Skip to main content

The Mirror Scene | SECOND


Mirror as a reflective surface has a metaphorical meaning in itself beyond its physical function. The introduction of the mirror to an infant triggers the formation of “I” at the very early months of lifespan as Lacan states in The Mirror Stage. From that point on, the mirror becomes something that captures the projection of self. That being the case, the mirror has been placed into many films since both the camera and mirror act as an external eye. As Godard states “Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self” and the mirror is used by many directors while revealing the inner self. 

First, I will be focusing on the mirror as a projector of the ego ideal. The term “ego ideal” is defined as the inner image of oneself as one wants to become, ideal selfhood. The mirror can be functioning in two opposite directions depending on the character’s psychological state. First, it can be the disconnection of the self and ego ideal resulting in depression when the ideal self does not correspond with the experiential reality. In Bresson’s film called “Une femme douce”, the female character looks toward the mirror which is placed aloft, and smiles at her ego-ideal before she kills herself indicating the unattainability of ideal self. At the extreme point, the disconnection of self and ego ideal can cause the suicide of one. 


On the other hand, the unification of ego and ego ideal can result in a manic state of mind that is seen in the film called “Der Fan” by Eckhart Schmidt where the female character kisses her reflection with passion. This theme has a long history starting from Narcissus who falls in love with his own reflection on the water. 

Secondly, the mirror can perform the task of a separator between rational and irrational. Rationale corresponds to conscious and daily reality, where irrational is accords with the unconscious. As an example, in the mirror scene of the film called “Evil Dead 2”, we observe interference of unconscious to rational reality.  



Finally, I believe there is a connection between the mirror and the camera in relation to scopophilia since they both focus on the gaze. I think the director Nicolas Roeg is pointing the same point while saying “mirrors are the essence of movies”.





Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Umbrella | Sexual References

The interpretation of an umbrella as an erotic symbol dates back to Greco-Roman god Bacchus and his followers called bacchantes. Since Bacchus’s cult was mainly associated with pleasure, rave, and ecstasy, the usage of the umbrella in different occasions like festivals or events by cult members assigned an erotic meaning to that object. Later its associations were generally made with royalty and wealth and this aspect has been forgotten. After a long time has passed, the character named Henrietta Petowker in Nicholas Nickleby was portrayed as “[she] knows that she is admired at the theatre by the jauntily phallic appearance of a most preserving umbrella in the upper boxes” by Charles Dickens, while he was pointing out the erotic perception of the object. Sixty years later Freud explains the relationship of umbrellas with the unconscious as such “all elongated objects, sticks, tree-trunks, umbrellas (on account of the opening, which might be likened to an erection), all sharp and elonga...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Umbrella

The word umbrella derives from the Latin where “umbra” means shadow.    Similarly, “para” defines shelter or shield, and “sol” means sun and they construct the word “parasol” which is used with the term umbrella interchangeably, yet parasols have a straight shaft different than the curved handle of the umbrella. As their etymological roots suggest, the primal intention of creating this object was the protection from exposure to the sun around four millennia before today. The early materials used in the construction were the tree leaves and branches until the invention of paper in China. The paper predecessors of this object later oiled since then the function of them have expanded from sunshade to protection from the rain even though they were not totally waterproof. These oil-paper parasols as well as dry, silk parasols made their way to Europe around Renaissance and became a fashionable trend amongst women. In 1708 The Kersey’s Dictionary defined the umbrella as “a scre...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Mirror Stage

I believe that cinema can be defined as an allegory of the mirror. This simile will not be built solely by focusing on the mirror scenes in the films but by comparing psychoanalytic aspects of both the cinema as an art form and the mirror. I will start with the emphasis on Lacan’s Mirror Stage since it is a formative theory about how the image of self is created before language and why it is crucial for a human being to function as a unified viable entity. Firstly, it can be claimed that humans are not born with an adequate number of instincts to make them conceptualize disparate bodily experiences. Therefore, the relation between the organism and its reality is needed to be established in order to differentiate the external and internal stimulants. In the mirror stage where the infants come across with their reflection, this “separation-individuation” is formed for the sake of ego subjectivity, since the baby observes its own body integrity in a full-length mirror. In the times that h...
Post a Comment
Read more