Perversion the Social Relation

ioéNina Schwartztively called into being by Eric's trickery. And the forced disruption ofhis ritual conduct may permit Francis to reattach himself to the symbolicorder that so radically failed him with the collapse of his family andpaternal identity. The most "optimistic" conclusion of all the stories, thisone still promises nothing very concrete, except for Tracey's healthy removalof herself from the system of debts and payments between Haroldand Francis.Christina, the former babysitter, is also revealed through the film'sfinal scene (a flashback to one of the narrative's earliest chronologicalmoments) to be suffering from her own ambiguous traumatic familylegacy. In that last scene, as Francis drives Christina home from a babysittinggig at his house, he waxes enthusiastic about Lisa's intelligenceand musical talent, which a shy Christina notes admiringly and somewhatwistfully. When Francis tries to reassure her that her own parentsno doubt talk about her with similarly affectionate interest, she stonilyreplies, "I don't think so." Recognizing Christina's unhappiness, Francispraises the girl in the only way he can think of at the moment, callingher "a very responsible young woman." Christina faintly wails, "Responsibleto what?" suggesting the absence for her of a stable structureof meaning, of rules. Francis himself offers to listen to Christina anytimeshe wants to talk about her problems, identifying this scene as perhapsthe "origin" of his later car-chat with Tracey. But Christina makesno revelation at this time, leaving viewers to speculate just what herfamily situation lacks or includes and how it has informed her later,current work as a dancer at Exotica. She may be attempting throughthose performances to gain, finally, the attention (such as she receivesso complexly from Francis) from paternal figures that has previouslybeen denied her. Or if, as Egoyan himself has suggested in an interview,Christina had an incestuous relationship with her father, she may in factj, be using her provocative but ultimately frustrating act both to provokeand to repudiate the desire of older men as she perhaps felt herself toprovoke and yet was unable to reject her father's desire for her. 18 In eithercase, Christina's dancing at the club seems to function as a repetition—she wears the uniform that Francis's daughter was wearing when shewas killed, but presumably it is also a uniform she might herself have; worn as a schoolgirl—by which she continues simultaneously to live out* i and to transform a previous trauma by which she has been marked. For