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Wednesday, January 23, 2013

"Eastern Promises" Lacanian Reading


After seeing this interesting and heart-breaking film, I thought a little bit about it and decided a Lacanian reading would be appropriate. Here is my (probably highly vulgarized) attempt.

There are two Symbolic orders present in the film: that of society (the non-mafia) and that of crime (the mafia). This goes counter to what Lacan usually talks about, which is a single Symbolic order. However, this makes more sense when we look at it from the perspective of a subject within one of those orders. “Normal people”, those in society, confront the mafia-order as the psychoanalytic subject confronts the Real, the unspeakable and unsymbolizable. Thus, the Real of the film depends on which point-of-view you take.
Nikolai, on the other hand, stands for the purely Symbolic—for him there is no Real, since he moves with ease between the two Symbolic orders, adapting himself to their logics regardless of the contradictions. He displays all the markings of psychosis (metaphorically at least): he does not so much use the Symbolic as he is used by the Symbolic. He is not directly relatable to the viewer—we do not cry or laugh with him; he is not a subject, he is the purely Symbolic. This is why he is so enigmatic, and seems to be both heartless killer and “normal guy” (in some very loose sense), depending on the context. He is not truly situated within a Symbolic order, but instead resorts to the typical psychotic strategy of mimicry.
Strictly speaking, Anna has two traumatic encounters with the Real: the first (which I was alerted to by Nathan Smith) is the adoption system, which she desperately tries to save the baby from; the second is the truth of the mafia, insofar as it is expressed through Tatiana's diary. The baby is then for her the direct, symbolizable product of the unsymbolizable act of rape that created it.
Going back to the initial point: the subjectivity of the Real is opposed to the Real-ness of the subject. The Real is subjective because it is what is unsymbolizable—but unsymbolizable to whom? The two simultaneously-existing symbolic orders in the film represent very different subjective positioning. On the other hand, the subject is only a subject insofar as it has a place within the Symbolic (we see this from Nikolai, who has no place because he has allplaces—there is nothing against which to measure him as a subject). To avoid the total integration into the Symbolic (and therefore psychosis), Lacan hypothesizes that the self ejects an object as it does an organ, what he calls the objet petit a. It is clear that this objet a is in fact a little piece of the Real. There is nothing equivalent done by Nikolai, to whom the Symbolic is as objects to have (as seen in many real-life cases of psychosis).
The message of the film is therefore (in this sense) the reclaiming of the unspeakable Real by the Symbolic (Anna's adoption of the child). Nikolai's function is to bridge the gap between the Real (of society) and the Symbolic, to blur the lines, as it were. That this is a fundamentally psychotic act is apparent.