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

While Cross implicitly acknowledges his castration by portraying Kitty’s larcenous selling
off of his artworks (through signing them in her own name), Helen’s castration is specific
to the woman in relation to the symbolic order of language – a signifying system she is
deprived of. Her own reflection in the mirror is realistic and mimetic, in other words, the
sign maintains a matching association with its object. The reading of the unidentified eye is
however symbolic. It introduces a form of stylisation which makes it less natural, and yet it
does not lose its truth. Instead, the killer’s gaze constructs another order of truth in which
absence is totally significant. The same eye that serves as a mirror of femininity is the one
that in some way provokes violence.
With the cinematic signifier, Christian Metz embraces the metaphor of the screen as
mirror, and places the roots of the cinema in the unconscious. To explain his argument,
Metz uses psychoanalysis to disclose three specific areas: mirror identification, voyeurism
and exhibitionism, and fetishism. While I have already discussed the topic of voyeurism,
mirror identification is, in Metz’s words, in a close relation with fetishism. The mirror
reflects everything but the spectator, yet he or she corroborates in the unity and identity of
the imagery. For one reason, film theory has resolutely linked cinema with the registering
of the imaginary, from Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalysis and semiotic theory to Metz’s
description of the cinematic signifier as imaginary. Moreover, Metz observes that cinema
involves the senses, as it:
(…) is more perceptual (…) than any other means of expression; it mobilises a
larger number of the axes of perception (that is why cinema has sometimes been
presented as a “synthesis of all the arts”; (…) it is true that cinema contains within
itself the signifiers of other arts: it can present pictures to us, make us hear music, it
is made of photographs, etc.). (Metz 1982:43)
But cinema shows itself as being totally absent from the perceptions it creates. The
person seen or the sound heard cannot be found outside the screen. The relationship
between the spectator and the image, justified in an absence, is defined by the attraction
and fascination of presence. When associated with the woman in The Spiral Staircase, that
absence is a reason for murder. This type of violence present in the film is the mirror of
narcissism in cinema, about which Lacan affirms: “Aggressivity is the correlative tendency
of a mode of identification that we call narcissistic, and which determines the formal
structure of a man’s ego and of the register of entities characteristic of his world” (Lacan
325