Last Tango in Paris Page: 6
Synopsis, Review, Comments, Critics
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IMAGES:
Picture Gallery 1 Miscellaneous Pictures
Picture Gallery 2 Miscellaneous Pictures
Movie Stills
The Godfather Photos
M. Brando & Godfather Posters, Prints, Photos
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Desire is a movement in the sense of being a mental activity designed to reactivate a scene connected with the past with the experience of pleasure. It immediately moves away from the desired
object in order to develop a desiring fantasy which already includes a certain satisfaction. It is fundamental to desire that it should constantly be detaching itself from its object and finding new representations. Repressed desires seek to be "ex-pressed" but in order to be pressed out they must, so to speak, become "ex-centric" to themselves and avoid censorship by moving about among "innocent" images. Displacement is one of the principal strategies of unconscious desire, for to desire is to move to other places. And those places are representations—which is to say the images of fantasy.
The film viewer as voyeur recapitulates symbolically and unconsciously a pattern enacted symbolically and overtly by Paul in the Jules Verne apartment. Unlike Paul, but like (Peeping) Tom, the film viewer anonymously watches through the "keyhole" of the lens or screen, participant in yet always absent from the action. And the scene viewed is always potentially or symbolically a primal scene in the sense that it evokes the child's "total store of unconscious knowledge and personal mythology concerning the human sexual relation, particularly that of his parents." The "inherently pornographic ontological conditions of film" are thus symbolically redeployed in Paul's behavior with Jeanne. But the relation between the act of cinematic viewing and the primal scene goes well beyond a merely erotic tendency, toward issues of personal (rather than merely cinematic) ontology:
The primal scene [argues Guy Rosolato] constitutes, among all the unconscious fantasies, a nucleus where origins are especially marked. First of all as an originating fantasy—genetic vis à vis the individual and even phylogenetic; secondly, as the nexus of curiosity about origins, birth, procreation, identity, filiation, and parenthood.... The primal scene can thus be considered as the most general yet concentrated of fantasies.
Thus voyeurism itself, which initially seems merely a perversion of normal desire, is, by its connection to the primal scene fantasy, a potentially ontological phenomenon. As film viewers, we may be attracted to the images projected as an "innocent" form of what are thought to be merely perverse drives but which ultimately function as information about our own origins and the possibility of recuperation of those origins.
Last Tango in Paris, however, can be viewed as a cautionary meditation on what Winnicott calls "creative looking." In Paul's purely physical regression in search of earlier modes of identity, he encounters increasingly sadistic, vengeful, and morbid tendencies in himself. The discomfort of Last Tango for some viewers relates to a similar discovery in the voyeuristic mode. If Jeanne is understood to function merely as a mirror of Paul's regressive fantasies, she appears as a typical cinematic sexual object. But in fact Jeanne has a life of her own—and motives of her own. She is attracted to the Jules Verne apartment for reasons just as complex as those that bring Paul there.
Like her double Rosa, Jeanne also has two lovers, Tom and Paul. Like Rosa's Marcel, Tom ends up being merely an image—and less. He succeeds only in evoking and promising future images. Whereas Rosa commits suicide because she seems unable to do anything but proliferate series of identically dressed and housed lovers, Jeanne instinctively moves toward a space where she can put a stop to this proliferation of surfaces (the "pop" marriage) and reach some depth.
At yet another level we remember that in her father's apartment in Paris Jeanne comes across a photograph of a Berber servant woman, naked to the waist. Her mother carelessly dismisses this evidence of the colonel's relations with his maidservants, complaining only of the fact that "the race of Berbers were difficult to train as servants." Jeanne, however, recognizes the pictured woman as a sexual object of her father's and a subject of intense jealousy and pity. We, however, may recognize Jeanne herself in the photograph, both as Paul's sexual object (within the film narrative) and as nude photograph (as a cinema actress in Last Tango in Paris!).
Because her father is now dead, Jeanne's "return" to the apartment can be understood as a voyage of recuperation, much like Paul's. She wants to "get her father back" both in terms of the love and affirmation that she needs from the opposite-sex parent and in terms of punishing him for his infidelity (both to Mother and to herself) and for his racist and sexist exploitation of women. Paul presents her with a perfect object, for he seems both to satisfy her regressive-erotic urges and to set himself up as the object of her revenge. Like Paul's swings of mood, Jeanne moves from an immediate and aggressive sexual possession of Paul to more hostile and punitive moods, such as those where she traps him into breaking his own rules or causes him to shock himself with the faulty wiring of the phonograph. If her own identity, like Paul's, is inextricably bound up with that of her parents, Jeanne manages to act out much of her relationship with a father figure in Paul.
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