Perversion the Social Relation

Exotic Rituals and Family Valuesin9 Miller, "On Perversion," 316.10 Ibid., 316-17.11 The internal quotation is from Freud's "Fetishism" (153). Mannoni also notes of thefetish that M it represents the last thing seen before the shock of the discovery of thefemale body. The memory of this discovery is blotted out by an act of forgetting thatFreud quite simply likens to traumatic amnesia. What thus comes into being is, however,only a screen memory; it is not yet a fetish. But a belief in the phallus thatis preserved in magical form, on the one hand, and, on the other, a screen memoryassociated with the anatomical discovery and tied to it in various ways, can veryeasily exist side by side—this is extremely common—in subjects who are not fetishists"(90).ix For the song's lyrics, see one of the many websites devoted to Leonard Cohen's works.13 According to Slavoj 2izek, the structure of disavowal also operates in what he calls,following Peter Sloterdijk, "cynical reasoning": "This cynicism is therefore a kind ofperverted 'negation of the negation' of the official ideology" (Slavoj 2izek, The SublimeObject of Ideology [London: Verso, 1989], 30). The stance of cynical reasoningobviates the need for any sort of analytic discourse, since it's predicated on the assumptionthat we all "know" the same things, are above the banalities of explanatorydiscourse. This is precisely what makes the stance ideological in 2i2ek's terms.14 In fact, however, the music is Schubert's Impromptu, op. 90, no. 4, rendered strangeby Indian instruments. It occurs at other moments during the film, played by Francis'sniece Tracey, and over the final credits. The traditional piano performance is byEgoyan's sister, Eve Egoyan, a professional musician.15 Egoyan's interest in voyeurism is manifest in most of his films. See in particular Nextof Kin (1984), Family Viewing (1987), Speaking Parts (1989), and The Adjuster (1991).16 Egoyan wrote the film in part in response to his experience of a tax audit: "No onecan think of an audit without some sort of terror, because of what power that theyhave to reveal and discover things that you might not have even known you'd donewrong. When I was audited, at first I thought, I have nothing to hide, and I made mybooks open to this person. But the moment that you get that first question..., thisperson looks at you very blankly, and he nods. And you think, is he onto something?Are they onto something that I don't even know about myself? It was really irresistible,to have this man [Francis] going to the club, so we were auditing, taking stock ofhis private life, and of course during the day he's doing that to someone else" (Fuchsinterview).17 The wife, we learn from family photographs, happens to be black; this fact for mostU.S. viewers qualifies as another example of "exoticism," though Egoyan himselfclaims that the biracial marriage is simply not the same issue to Canadians that it isto other North Americans (Fuchs interview).18 Fuchs interview with Egoyan. Egoyan discusses his interest in incest more specificallyin an interview with Richard Porton regarding a subsequent film, The SweetHereafter (1997).