Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

2.4 Freudianism and Existentialism
The person best able to undergo psychoanalysis is
someone who, no matter how incapacitated at the time, is
basically, or potentially, a sturdy individual. This person
may have already achieved important satisfactions—with
friends, in marriage, in work, or through special interests
and hobbies - but is nonetheless significantly impaired by
long-standing symptoms: depression or anxiety, sexual
incapacities, or physical symptoms without any
demonstrable underlying physical cause. One person may
be plagued by private rituals or compulsions or repetitive
thoughts of which no one else is aware. Another may live
a constricted life of isolation and loneliness, incapable of
feeling close to anyone. (Paris 2005:107)
Sexuality, be it hidden or prohibited, has always been a key issue in Freudian
psychoanalysis. Most noir thrillers have recourse to psychoanalytical ideas as a means to
suggest what filmmakers could not in fact show due to censorship mechanisms. On the
whole, classical Hollywood had many problems with these representational boundaries.
With film noir the difficulty was further accentuated since this group of films was
especially centred on corruptive and sexual machinations, making them a distinct and
separate entity within the history of American film. The association between
psychoanalysis and sex would thus have to find a form of indirect representation in which
allusiveness through condensation and displacement played primary roles. In this context,
it is worth quoting Borde and Chaumeton at length:
In film noir there is an attempt to create an atmosphere of latent, vague and
polymorphous sexuality which everyone could project their desires into and
structure how they wanted, like a Rorschach ink-blot (…). By such means of
playing with official censorship, this eroticism recalls Freud’s notion of the dreamwork:
instead of showing forbidden realities, seemingly neutral elements are
introduced which are nevertheless evocative by association or through symbolism.
So dance is an age-old transposition of the sexual act itself, but the ‘thriller’ has
from time-to-time made subtle use of this worn-out allegory (…). Certain fetishistic
themes could be explained in a similar way: the boots and gloves of Rita Hayworth
in Gilda (…). The sadomasochistic episodes, in accordance with the very subject of
film noir, lent themselves particularly well in this technique of allusion. In the
pleasure / violence pairing, the exhibiting of the second term will sometimes add up
to a substitute for the first, the presence of which will be implied by a few details
152