UVM Theses and Dissertations
Format:
Print
Author:
Cottrel, Adam Kildare
Title:
Dept./Program:
English
Year:
2009
Degree:
MA
Abstract:
This project's primary concern is to formulate a working notion of time, desire, and enjoyment within the filmic world of Wong Kar-wai. Three of Wong's films will be under discussion here: Days of Being Wild (1990), In the Mood For Love (2000), and 2046 (2004). These films, which I will refer to as a triptych, are interrelated through theme (time, desire, fantasy), characters (Chow Mo-wan, So Lai-chen, LulufMimi, etc.), and place (Hong Kong, Singapore). Wong has explicitly denied that these films should be understood as a trilogy, but he has suggested at several points during their completion how they are continuations, extended chapters of the lives of his characters. Thus, my work is based on viewing them as a connected whole. This reading, I think, will reveal further points of interest and help to facilitate a dialogue that opens up the true import of Wong's cinema.
Using a theoretical approach grounded in the psychoanalytic approach of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and Slavoj Žižek, I intend to work through the recurrent issues Wong's cinema in ways that leave both operations wholly invested in the other. It is only through a psychoanalytic understanding of fantasy, desire, and the atemporality of the drive that Wong's films can be understood at their most politically progressive. By taking extended looks at Freud's Trieb ("drive") I hope to work through the tension that this triptych is bound to display: the temporal logic of progressive time and the atemporality of the drives. This reading will reveal both the universal antagonism within desire, but also constitute Wong's cinema as a direct move away from and a reimagining of the ideological stranglehold the cinema has a had on desire. In imagining desire as simply one constructed impulse -- the impulse to possess -- the cinema has stripped desire of its potential place in cultural understandings of enjoyment. In its current state, desire's satisfaction is tied to one operation and that is enjoying the object of its intent.
What this project attempts to discover is how desire is more constitutive to our enjoyment when left in a state of dissatisfaction. Commonplace notions of some "ultimate," "complete," or "total" enjoyment are exposed in this study as being intrinsically fictive. What Wong's films allow is a new way of understanding the tenets of enjoyment and satisfaction through the lens of a psychoanalytic theory that largely looks to understand our pleasure as derived fiom sublimating activity. Freeing the subject from the shackles of enjoying through one ideological structure, the temporal aspect of Wong's cinema is of interest in how our impulsive acts are at once recurrent and at odds with their own aims. Key is to understand not only the subjective nature of Lacan's split-subject, but in addition the drive as split in and of itself. Subjectivity takes on a new role here; enjoying becomes a state of understanding outside of possession; time is understood only as that which we can't fully understand; and desire is allowed its role as the logic of illogical activity.
Using a theoretical approach grounded in the psychoanalytic approach of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and Slavoj Žižek, I intend to work through the recurrent issues Wong's cinema in ways that leave both operations wholly invested in the other. It is only through a psychoanalytic understanding of fantasy, desire, and the atemporality of the drive that Wong's films can be understood at their most politically progressive. By taking extended looks at Freud's Trieb ("drive") I hope to work through the tension that this triptych is bound to display: the temporal logic of progressive time and the atemporality of the drives. This reading will reveal both the universal antagonism within desire, but also constitute Wong's cinema as a direct move away from and a reimagining of the ideological stranglehold the cinema has a had on desire. In imagining desire as simply one constructed impulse -- the impulse to possess -- the cinema has stripped desire of its potential place in cultural understandings of enjoyment. In its current state, desire's satisfaction is tied to one operation and that is enjoying the object of its intent.
What this project attempts to discover is how desire is more constitutive to our enjoyment when left in a state of dissatisfaction. Commonplace notions of some "ultimate," "complete," or "total" enjoyment are exposed in this study as being intrinsically fictive. What Wong's films allow is a new way of understanding the tenets of enjoyment and satisfaction through the lens of a psychoanalytic theory that largely looks to understand our pleasure as derived fiom sublimating activity. Freeing the subject from the shackles of enjoying through one ideological structure, the temporal aspect of Wong's cinema is of interest in how our impulsive acts are at once recurrent and at odds with their own aims. Key is to understand not only the subjective nature of Lacan's split-subject, but in addition the drive as split in and of itself. Subjectivity takes on a new role here; enjoying becomes a state of understanding outside of possession; time is understood only as that which we can't fully understand; and desire is allowed its role as the logic of illogical activity.