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

Although the idea is not to go into all the complexities of psychoanalysis, what I am
proposing here is that we seem to see an inversion that defines the shift from classical
detection to film noir, not so much in terms of identification but rather in terms of the
choice between sense and being or, in Lacanian theory, between desire and drive (drive
here differs from any biological needs as they can never be satisfied and do not aim at
objects either but rather circle unendingly around them - so the genuine basis of jouissance
is to repeat the movement of this closed circuit). Rather, Lacan posits the drives as both
cultural and symbolic (discourse) constructs. And in the shift from desire to drive, says
Lacan, the individual moves from the lost object to the loss itself as an object.
This brings me back to the gap that I was referring to above, the “impossible” quest
for the lost object which will directly enact the loss itself. The endless circularity of the
drive seems to engage Christopher Cross or Walter Neff, in Scarlet Street and Double
Indemnity respectively. With both, but most notably in the case of Cross, we could perhaps
sum up the character’s mixed feelings with Lacan’s theory: “Desire is neither the appetite
for satisfaction nor the demand for love, but the difference that results from the subtraction
of the first from the second” (in Fink 1996:90). In fact, all three main noir protagonists of
these films (Diamond, Cross and Neff) seem to follow this circular trajectory or gap
responsible for the onset of desire. Thus, one could say that the cause of desire elicits
desire which in turn is metonymically responsible for the slippage from one object to the
next.
For the theory of the abjection, suggested by Julia Kristeva, this lost object exists
within both notions of “object” and “subject”, something which is alive or maybe not.
There is a play around the revealing and the concealing of the woman in these films (even
of the woman in the past, as in Rebecca, for example, that is perpetuated through a trail of
visual clues; or in Laura – if Laura is never fully present in the film, then equally she is
never fully absent either. In fact, her narrative presence is over-determined by the recurrent
discussion of her by other characters). These women – Susan, Kitty, and Phyllis – seem to
be situated in the sphere of over-idealisation which equates, in Kristevan terms, to an
imaginary return to the maternal chora, or the place of plenitude (or what Lacan calls “the
Real”) for the male protagonists. Being forced to face the fact that these women are
intangible at any time, the male characters in most of these films are led to traumatic
experiences and end up killing their object of desire.
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