Perversion the Social Relation

96 Nina Schwartzbeing staged from any transfiguration, from the loss that would inevitablyfollow its entrance into a larger symbolic order.The song to which the young stripper Christina performs her dancesuggests the fetishistic structure that informs all the characters' strategiesfor dealing with their various losses and traumas. The song is LeonardCohen's "Everybody Knows," which captures precisely the structureof the fetish as Freud and others describe it. 12 As something that standsin for the female's absent penis, the fetish both covers over that absence,thereby protecting the subject from the anxiety it would induce, andsimultaneously testifies to the very absence that it is supposed to belie. Inperversion, the subject holds two contradictory beliefs simultaneouslywithout repressing either. Mannoni accounts for the specificity of disavowalas a response to castration: In this paradoxical form of beliefthat knows better, "desire acts at a distance on conscious material, causingthe laws of the primary process to manifest themselves there: Verleugnung(thanks to which belief survives disavowal) is explained by thepersistence of desire and the laws of the primary process" (80-81). 13In representing its characters to be both operating in accord with adisavowal of what they know to be true and attempting to bring a lostorder into being, Exotica thus elucidates Lacan's theory of the perverseand also suggests both the efficacy and the limitations of a communityorganized around such repetitive restaging. Further, Exotica may alsopermit us to consider how films in general facilitate a similar repetitioncompulsion in mass audiences, staging the pleasurable violations thatcall up a comforting or retributive law with the reassuring implicationthat such a law can be trusted to exist in the world.The film's first image initiates its consideration of how public and privatespaces—and perverse and ordinary experiences—overlap with andinfiltrate one another. The scene is either a static backdrop, such as mightbelong to Exotica the sex club, or a waiting area of an airport: it includesactual palm trees set against a painted background of the same;the images are accompanied by eastern-sounding music, clichéd signifierof the "exotic." 14 The ambiguity of the image's location results froma cut from the backdrop, against which the credits are screened, to thefilm's firstdiegetic moment in which two customs officers look througha one-way mirror at travelers recently returned to Canada. As one agentspeaks to the other, his voice-over links the backdrop to the subsequent