NTUT Undergraduate
Black Narcissus
Although it is set in India, in the Himalayas, in one of the most strikingly beautiful places on earth—a majestic mountain watched over by a Holy Man, where the air is crystal clear, the water perfectly clean, and the vegetation rich, colorful and abundant (a Christian ideal of Eden, in fact)—and although the film concerns a community of nuns—women who have dedicated their lives to the example of Jesus and who have renounced worldly desires (marriage, wealth, politics, normal social activities)—this, nevertheless, is a film about desire, hatred, jealousy, paranoia, violence, and murder. In short, it is a film about love. It is one of the most intelligent films about love ever made; it is completely without romance and becomes a kind of x-ray into this most human of pathologies.
What happens in the film? There is very little plot. Briefly, a group of nuns who are not contemplative but who have renounced the world by way of being “workers”, comes to India to occupy a house (“the house of women” which previously had been occupied by the wives and mistresses of local generals), to set up a school and infirmary—there to live out their lives. They do not say they are there to convert the local people (there are no scenes of religious instruction), only to serve them and thus to serve God through the example of Jesus. They are assisted by the local British ‘agent’, Mr. Dean, who is in some ways helpful and in some ways annoying. In short, he is not perfect; he is “human”. Likewise, Mr. Dean says that most of the people who live in the area are definitively human: “the men are men; the women, women; and the children, children”. All seems perfectly in order, and yet, and yet, in just a few months, a nun wishes to be transferred, another believes she has murdered a child, the Sister Superior is tormented by memories of her youth, and another leaves the order altogether, tries to murder the Sister Superior, and then she herself dies. Having failed, the nuns then leave India to be reassigned, and it starts to rain.
If I were a movie producer I would listen to this plot synopsis and say: “So what?” “What is this movie really about?” I do not think that the movie, nor its success, can be explained by its plot alone. Like 300 it is visually impressive, but like 300 its appeal to audiences lies elsewhere than pure aesthetics. In my opinion the only way to explain what happens in this movie is through psychoanalysis. In some ways the nuns are like the Spartans in 300: they have renounced ‘normal’ life, they are self-denying (they themselves are less—always less—important that their mission), they are a unit that works together with a leader, they need discipline, and they are surrounded by people from the East, from a foreign culture they cannot make sense of and have no wish to make sense of. But unlike 300 there is no cultural conflict: the nuns do not try to convert anybody, and nobody in the area tries to convert them. The film instead focuses on this small group of women and what happens to their minds. In 300 the focus was on the bodies of the Spartans and Persians, and on their ideologies. So, we have to learn a little bit about the basics of psychoanalysis through Sigmund Freud and his great re-interpreter, Jacques Lacan. Let’s begin with desire.
In psychoanalysis there is no more basic term to understand than desire. (The Holy Man in the film represents what we in the West call ‘the extinction of’, or ‘the eradication of’, desire. Westerners have always been fascinated by this because we cannot quite see how these Holy Men are able to extinguish the desire that is so much a part of life, or even why they or we should want to.) What is desire? To begin with, in psychoanalysis, desire is distinguished from need. Human beings need some things in order to live: air, food, water, etc. and when we get them, we live. So, everything is fine: there is need and there is satisfaction. The attempt to satisfy needs is called instinct. This is all very biological. This refers to the human being as an organism. But there are many kinds of organisms. What makes human beings different from other beings (if they are)? To psychoanalysis what makes them unique is desire and a specific desire: the desire for…we know not what. So, often we call this “we know not what”: love. At any rate, psychoanalysis seeks, and has always sought, to uncover the truth of desire.
Consider the human infant who has been born into the world prematurely, who has no ability to talk, to farm, to hunt, to kill, to crawl to a stream to drink water. The human infant is completely helpless and would die within days without someone to care for it. The infant instinctually feels hunger, it cries, and then someone comes to feed the infant. (It does not matter who—it could be an animal!) The infant is satisfied and the instinctual need is temporarily satisfied. Often, the infant then sleeps. But then it feels hunger again, cries, and the Other (anybody: mother, father, a wolf) comes and he or she is satisfied again. What Lacan then tried to do is to separate out an organization that begins right here, with the crying infant. The infant is learning that, when feeling this pain we call hunger, it may cry and then be satisfied. What had been an instinctual cry is now organized into an appeal or a demand. This is the human infant’s first step towards articulation or language. It is organized sound—the cry—that ends with the infant being satisfied. Now, at around this time something amazing happens. The infant who has become organized enough to demand satisfaction begins to absorb that it is some Other who brings the food (or water or whatever) which then satisfies the instinctual need. That is to say, the demand brings both satisfaction and also something else. Demand is demand for satisfaction (of an instinctual need) and also demand for something else: the Other who brings satisfaction. If no Other creature cared about the infant, then no Other would come when he or she cries. But some Other does come; some Other wants to come, desires to come. The infant, who is still helpless, has unconsciously begun to organize and command an Other’s desire in it’s demand to have its instinctual needs satisfied. The infant has begun to organize or to command desire (its own and another’s). An Other comes and then there is satisfaction of need. It is this duplicity that gives birth to desire. Desire, for Lacan, is the difference between need and satisfaction. That difference is a gap filled by the Other. Ultimately, the satisfaction of the instinctual need is filled by the love of the Other, and the love of the Other ultimately replaces the instinctual need. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, demand is always a demand for love. Satisfaction is merely the proof of the Other’s love; that which is ultimately demanded is the Other’s love itself and this demand is linked to infantile helplessness. Every demand is an attestation of helplessness. (In later years, when a neurotic patient goes to a psychoanalyst for help it is clear to the psychoanalyst that the patient is not requesting assistance, the patient is demanding assistance, demanding to be cured, ultimately demanding to be loved (by the psychoanalyst) and so the work of psychotherapy must involve returning the patient to that state of helplessness in which these needs, demands, and then desires began and then making him or her talk, express, communicate (but in words, not cries) their desire. It is a difficult process fraught with peril since it involves need, demand and desire. In any case, psychoanalysis begins with need, then moves to demand, and then to desire—which leads to love, jealousy, revenge, paranoia, violence, murder…basically human life as we know it in many, many Hollywood movies.
Now, the difference between need and satisfaction is desire, and desire is nothing but the ambivalence of demand: the demand to be satisfied together with the demand to be loved. For Lacan, desire, at this point in the infant’s development, begins to become a constant pressure on the infant who does not yet know what is happening, and so this constant pressure—which cannot merely be satisfied (like hunger or thirst)—becomes the thread which will organize his or her entire life. (In Black Narcissus there is the wind that is constantly blowing—is this not desire? The Holy Man stays on the mountain in the wind (desire) but trains himself not to care; Mr. Dean goes down the mountain so as to be out of the wind—he is a complicated character who thinks he can avoid desire—but, when, near the end, he vehemently says to Sister Ruth “I DON’T LOVE ANYBODY”. I am not sure I believe him, do you? Perhaps his is a story for another movie.) Now—and this is extremely important—the infant is not yet in language; the infant is a more organized system than he or she was when born, but is not yet articulate in any adult sense. Thus, the birth of desire is unconscious. It is born “between” animal need and human (not animal) satisfaction. Desire is unconscious desire and unconscious desire is the cornerstone of Lacan’s revision of Freud. Unconscious desire is desire for—I know not what or who, because is it desire for some thing (like food) or is it desire for some one (the Other who is able to satisfy desire)? And so, Lacan developed the term ‘l’objet petit a’ which in English means “the little object a” where ‘a’ is like a mathematical sign that could mean anything. In short, human desire does not know exactly what it desires—it only knows that it desires, demands, a something (or a someone), some ‘a’ from somewhere. This is why, when adult lovers gaze at each other and say “what do you love about me?’ the answer is never completely satisfying: “I love your eyes!”, “I love your hair!”, “I love the sound of your voice!” and so on. It is a commonplace for philosophers to step in here and say, OK, you love my eyes. Well, suppose that tomorrow I have a horrible accident and lose both my eyes; does this mean that then you no longer love me? The anxious lover then replies “NO! NO! Not your eyes, but what they express!” or something like that. In other words, what I love about you is nothing I can name or point to; it is l’objet petit a!
Now, let’s go back to the infant who has organized things so that his or her cries bring the Other to satisfy the need. We have supposed that the infant eventually becomes organized enough to expect that the cry brings not only satisfaction of animal need but also an Other who gives him or her the satisfaction, and which he or she eventually comes to know as love. This means that, at bottom, what that infant demands is not only satisfaction of needs but also the desire that the Other be the one to satisfy the needs—otherwise the infant (who is helpless) suffers and dies. That which the Other desires is that the infant desire that it (the Other) be the one who satisfies desire. That which the infant desires is that the Other desire to satisfy the infant, and the Other desires that it (the Other) be desired by the infant. Succinctly: desire is the desire for the Other’s desire. Or even more succinctly: desire desires desire. The Lacanian l’objet petit a is just another way of saying that all desire is desire for the Other’s desire. This means that the infant is locked into a mortal contest with the Other: each desires that the other recognize the other’s desire for the other’s desire: Each desires the other’s desire. And this is what leads to hatred, jealousy, paranoia, and murder…our film! It leads in two directions: the intellectual and the brutal. It is women who are intellectual in the film; problems and disagreements are sorted out by speech and prayer, according to the nuns led by Sister Superior. But the other way is the brutal way, as articulated by the housekeeper when she urges the general (after finding that Kanchi has stolen something relatively insignificant): “Finish the beating my little general! You’re going to be a great man! Not like your uncle [the Holy Man]! Oh dear no! Like your grandfather! He was a man! Finish the beating and begin to be a man!!!” In short, she is saying: don’t play this desire game! End it! You alone are the desired! Don’t let her think that you desire her desire!
This scene represents another important truth of desire. What is happening here is that as a consequence of the duplicity of demand two distinct desires appear—the desire to have and the desire to be. The housekeeper seems to understand this instinctively. After aging, after desire (the difference between need and satisfaction) separates itself completely from anything biological, the infant begins to become human. This is the difficult and somewhat protracted process which involves the young person in the famous Oedipal stage. Perhaps in another course I can teach you about that stage. Here I want to focus on the film. The question the viewer is left with is just why does Sister Ruth develop her delirious hatred for Sister Superior? Sister Ruth says she loves Mr. Dean, she appears to be jealous of the attention Mr. Dean pays to Sister Superior, and when Sister Superior says that she should leave the community, Sister Ruth shouts: “Send me back and shut me up! That’s what you would all like to do! […] because you’re all jealous of me! Especially you! […] they all hate me!” But there is no evidence that anybody hates her or is jealous of her; it is she who hates and is jealous. This is “projection” which I spoke about last week. The film allows us to know very little about Sister Ruth—her background, her moments alone, her thoughts. Instead I think it presents her as a set of symptoms, and these symptoms have a common name in psychoanalysis: psychotic paranoia. Very early in the film the older Sister, when she is selecting the Sisters to go to India, says of Sister Ruth, “Yes, she is a problem.” I think that Powell presents her precisely as a problem; a problem who wants to be a person but who does not know how to accomplish the task. This is psychoanalysis.
Jacques Lacan’s very first work as a professional was with psychotics. His first publication was about the case of “Aimée”, a mentally disturbed woman who nearly stabbed to death a famous Parisian actress. A year later he studied and published a work on the infamous Papin sisters, servants who had slit the throats of their employer and his daughter and then dismembered them. In each case Lacan’s diagnosis was psychotic paranoia. In each case he noted that the violence had erupted out of the blue, for no sensible reason that police or prosecutors could fathom. Lacan at the time was a psychiatrist; he then shifted into psychoanalysis, studied, and beginning with these cases, significantly revised Freud’s analysis of the psychoses (including, especially, paranoia).
For Freud, paranoia is based on a disavowal of homosexuality. His most famous case was the study of a man who exhibited many of the same symptoms as Sister Ruth: anxiety, delirium, feelings of persecution, jealousy, and megalomania. In his study Freud concluded that the psychotic actually loves the one who is persecuting him or her, but this love must be negated, disavowed, pushed outside (because it is contrary to social norms, to values, to nature, or to God’s plan). Freud wrote that the patient has various ways of denying this love. The basic truth to be denied is homosexuality: I, am man, love him. This is disavowed; the verb is inverted, and he says to himself: I do not love him. This is then projected onto the beloved: He does not love me and is then intensified into persecution: He hates me. Or, it is intensified into jealousy: I love him becomes She loves him. Or, finally, into megalomania: I do not love anybody. I love only myself! (This may also be Mr. Dean’s deep secret.) In any case the initial truth, the initial passion—I, a man, love him or I, a woman, love her—does not disappear but is projected outside.
Now, Lacan notes that Freud was especially interested in the sexuality of homosexuality, in an erotic drive to have something, namely, sexual satisfaction (which the patient could not acknowledge for many reasons—social, cultural, religious, whatever). But Lacan shifted the emphasis to homosexuality. This nuance changes everything and begins Lacan’s stunning re-invention of psychoanalysis. The paranoid, according to Lacan, loves a counterpart, a semblance, someone “as similar as possible”, he writes, to him or her. In our film, Sister Superior and Sister Ruth are nearly the same age and they look very much like each other. You could almost mistake one for the other especially since they wear identical “habits” (the name for the very distinctive clothes nuns were once required to wear). In short, that which the paranoid “loves” is an image of herself in the other. The paranoid loves herself and hates herself in her double for she (the rival, the double, the one who is almost the very same as the paranoid) has stolen the place which the paranoid would like to occupy. She, the rival, has already become what the paranoid would like to be. Thus it is not at all a sexual love; the paranoid does not want to have the other, the rival, as a source of sexual satisfaction. The hated rival is an example of what Freud called the Ichideal, the ego-ideal, or “what one would like to be.” And, since “what one would like to be” is already a double of the paranoid, the ego-ideal is narcissistic. I cannot but believe that Michael Powell, who wrote and directed the film, titled it Black Narcissus without having read Freud and maybe even Lacan. Within this psychoanalytic context, the film makes perfect sense. In both Freud and Lacan, the paranoid is involved in a vicious fight to the death with the rival/double who has, to the afflicted mind, “stolen” her place, who has in fact “stolen” her very being: the ego-ideal, the ego she would like to be. Consider how many times in the film is the word “superior” in Sister Superior emphasized. (The young prince says, “I would like to speak to the superior sister”.) This Sister represents, for Sister Ruth, the ideal Sister, the Sister she would like to be and it has nothing at all to do with eroticism. This is a significant part of Lacan’s revision of Freud. In our film Sister Ruth loves only herself, Mr. Dean is merely her attempt to take the place of Sister Superior whom she deliriously believes is enamored of him; when this fails, her only option is to eliminate the hated rival altogether.
Another interesting aspect of the film is sound beginning with the opening shot of those two enormous, golden horns which emit a strange sound. I haven’t found out what they are called or what their significance is in Hindu culture. Perhaps Powell also did not know. In any case, they emit a sound which, to my ear is half way between the voice of an animal and a musical sound. Put differently, the sound is between voice and music, or it is the sound of the difference between voice and music. It is a very commanding sound, impossible to ignore. The sound is very similar to the sound made by the Jewish Shofar, one of the most ancient wind instruments. Freud, Lacan, and other psychoanalysts have written about this instrument. In the film, this sound, which occurs three more time in the film and at critical, emotional moments, has to represent something which is irresistible but which cannot be understood. Another use of sound is the drums which are played continually when some child is ill. They stop only when the child dies. Likewise, for Lacan, desire persists in human life and ends only when we die. For Lacan desire is neither good nor bad; it is simply constant. In addition there is the sound of Mr. Dean’s voice which really is beautiful. His voice separates itself from his personality (which is not beautiful) and one cannot hear it except as beautiful, whatever the sisters may think of him.
Beyond sound there is the water which is “too pure”, the atmosphere which is so clear that you can see “too much” and “too far”. All these things are summed up by Sister Superior who says: “I find these things very disturbing, yes, disturbing…the clean air and the wind always blowing and the mountain and this Holy Man…” The film continually presents things which the sisters cannot ignore, cannot deny, and which are persistently distracting them. Smells are another: the “smell” of the children and of the perfume, called “Black Narcissus”, neither of which Sister Ruth cannot stand, saying “I don’t like scent at all!” The palace where the Sisters will form their community is itself said, by Mr. Dean, to lie “in the back of beyond”. What could this mean except ‘from a time before we were even conscious of time, from our helplessness, from the obscure origin of our desires’?
And so on, and so on. By now, I think you see my point although I could not find anyone who has written about the film in this way. Most reviews are spellbound by the ravishing color Powell’s camera captures which I don’t deny, but I don’t know how to understand what happens without recourse to Freud and Lacan.
Finally, what does all this have to do with “cultural communication”? Well, we now live in what is called an era of ‘globalism’ where every culture is important and can contribute to every other culture—the Persian ideal represented in 300. The Western political philosopher Thomas Hobbes was the fist thinker in the West to talk about equality. His thesis was that every human being is more or less equal to every other human being, not exactly equal but fundamentally equal. That sounds great. No human being is “superior” to any other. In globalism no culture is “superior” to another. That also sounds great. However, the consequences of fundamental equality, for Hobbes, are horrible. For him, since we are all more or less equal then we all more or less want the same things, and since no one is fundamentally superior to anyone else, then we will eventually all fight each other to the death for the things we all want. Hobbes was horrified by the vision of an endless global civil war. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, there is also conflict with equals, that is rivals, doubles, or ego-ideals which ends in delirium, paranoia, violence and death. By the very nature of things—whether fundamental equality or desire—there is always the possibility of violence and nothing can eliminate this possibility. In other words, globalism and fundamental equality are inherently perilous. Now, both Hobbes and Lacan have “solutions” to the problem. For Hobbes we are also all fundamentally and equally rational. Thus we can all more or less agree that equality is inherently perilous, and so we all should lay down our arms, renounce violence, and obey a single leader which he called ‘Leviathan’ whom we all agree is not fundamentally but is rationally our superior. However, for Lacan desire is unconscious; it eludes rationality and for him the Hobbesian solution will never work. Instead, there is the process of discourse, of talk, of bringing unconscious desire into speech and then creating a new reality out of our abilities to communicate. Basically, for him, our choice is: communicate or kill. (In truth, Lacan was extremely pessimistic about the future of humanity because the communication he had in mind is very difficult.)
I myself do not necessarily agree with either of them, but their thinking is worth considering. In any case, thank you for your attention!
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