Читать книгу Fictions of Home - Martin Mühlheim - Страница 12

While homes in general are shaped by larger power structures, the particular agents of domination often reside in the home itself, with some inhabitants exerting a truly tyrannous controlcontrol over the minds and bodies of others (DouglasDouglas, Mary, “The Idea of Home” 277). Children, for instance, are often seen as key inhabitants of truly homelyhomely homes, but many parents do not grant them much “agencyagency in the running or representationrepresentation of these homes” (BluntBlunt, Alyson and DowlingDowling, Robyn 115). Such familial domination in fact plays an important part in E.T., for it is because Elliott’s mother would surely not allow E.T. to stay that the boy hides him from her. Indeed, given that Elliott at one point literally keeps E.T. in the closet, his fear of parental sanction may productively be read from a queerqueer perspective: the alien, it seems, must not come out. More generally speaking, what counts as a ‘proper’ or ‘homely’ home very often depends on individuals’ physical and moral conformityconformism and conformity to cultural ideals and prejudices, and the supposedly private family home often serves as one key site where these values are passed on to future generations.

To some extent the formative influence of childhoodchildhood homes explains the widespread assumption that learning more about someone’s home tells us something about the kind of person they are. As we have already seen, it is precisely this assumption that motivates Elliott to convey the meaning of “home” to E.T.: the boy wants to find out where the alien comes from in order to understand what kind of being he is. Such a “conflation of home and selfself” is, as Rosemary MarangolyGeorge, Rose Marangoly George points out, a central trope in various disciplines: “literary theory, architecturearchitecture, sociology, political sciencescience, geographygeography, philosophyphilosophy and psychology” (19). At the same time, MarangolyGeorge, Rose Marangoly George highlights the danger inherent in conflating home and self, as those who are homeless, or who happen to live in ‘deviant’ homes, may easily come to be judged as faulty selves (24). This is all the more so because, as BluntBlunt, Alyson and DowlingDowling, Robyn observe, in any given society or culture “a central feature of imaginaries of home is their idealizationidealization: certain dwellingdwelling structures and social relations are imagined to be ‘better’” (100). Historically specific ideals of a ‘stable home’ help explain, for instance, why ‘unsettled’ nomadsnomads have repeatedly been regarded as a threat to societal order, with the nineteenth century in particular witnessing a worldwide onslaught on nomadic ways of life (BaylyBayly, C.A. 434; OsterhammelOsterhammel, Jürgen 173).

In addition, the formative influence of childhoodchildhood homes is one reason why the family is of such crucial importance to the discoursediscourse of psychoanalysispsychoanalysis and psychoanalytic criticism. In her study Figurations of Exile, Barbara StraumannStraumann, Barbara even suggests that psychoanalysispsychoanalysis and psychoanalytic criticism is “the most paradigmatic critical discourse of twentieth-century culture to address questions of identity and belonging as well as the fundamental dislocation subtending all subjectivitysubjectivity” (13). FreudFreud, Sigmund, for instance, famously used a bourgeoisbourgeois domestic metaphormetaphor when he argued that the ego “is not master in his own house” (Introductory Lectures 285), and such concepts as the family romancefamily romance and the OedipalOedipus complex triangle between mother, father, and child, are of course central to psychoanalyticpsychoanalysis and psychoanalytic criticism endeavors. In addition, in later texts – such as Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921) or Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), FreudFreud, Sigmund explicitly addresses the question of belonging to larger social structures.29

The most frequently evoked text by FreudFreud, Sigmund on the issue of home is, however, his essay on the uncannyuncanny: a type of fear that arises when one is confronted with something that seems other to oneself, but which in fact represents a repressed, unassimilated part of the selfself. Noting that the German word unheimlich (‘uncanny’) not only contains the word heimlich (‘secret,’ ‘hidden,’ or ‘covert’), but is also related to the homelyhomely and familiarfamiliarity (e.g. das Heim, heimelig; “The Uncanny” 126–134), FreudFreud, Sigmund argues that the uncanny is best understood as “something that was long familiarfamiliarity to the psyche and was estranged from it only through being repressed” (148).30 The doubledouble or Doppelgänger or Doppelgänger is, for FreudFreud, Sigmund, one particularly frequent motif associated with the uncanny (141), and E.T. in fact functions as the uncanny double for Elliott. As Julia KristevaKristeva, Julia notes, initially one’s encounter with the doubledouble or Doppelgänger “is a shock” (Strangers to Ourselves 188) – and in SpielbergSpielberg, Steven’s film, shock is Elliott’s first reaction at seeing E.T. when the boy stumbles upon him in the field behind his suburbansuburbia home.31 Crucially, E.T.’s reaction mirrors Elliott’s precisely, and they flee from each other in panic. In time, however, Elliott overcomes his initial reaction of shock and coaxes E.T. to the safetysafety of his room. There, E.T. soon becomes sleepy, and Elliott, too, drifts off to sleep, as if to emphasize the extent to which they mirror each other. In a later sequence, in the course of which Elliott explains the contents of his room to E.T., the alien tries to eat Elliott’s toy carcar, prompting the boy to exclaim: “Hey, wait a second! No! You don’t eat ’em. Are you hungry? I’m hungry” (MathisonMathison, Melissa 69). The emotional parallel between them thus continues, and while Elliott goes to the kitchen to grab some food, E.T. explores the boy’s room and finds an umbrella. Suddenly, the umbrella opens and startles, not only E.T., but also Elliott, who is still downstairs in the kitchen. This moment makes it clear to the audience that there is a mysterious telepathic link between the two – and FreudFreud, Sigmund explicitly mentions telepathytelepathy as yet another motif typically associated with the uncanny (141).

Given E.T.’s function as Elliott’s (initially) uncannyuncanny double, there is a good case to be made that the alien in fact represents Elliott’s unconscious. Thomas SebeokSebeok, Thomas, for instance, has pointed out that E.T. and Elliott are not merely friends, but in a profound sense “identical, as the boy’s very name, ElliotT, insinuates” (661). From ‘Elliott’ to ‘E.T.’ by means of condensation and displacement: we are faced with two of the crucial mechanisms of the Freudian unconscious.32 Moreover, in one scene in SpielbergSpielberg, Steven’s film E.T. makes a notably appreciative noise when seeing Elliott’s mother, Mary, in a tight-fitting Halloween costume, as if Elliott’s OedipalOedipus complex desiredesire for Mary had been displaced onto his alien friend. In fact, a scene was cut from the final version of the film that would have rendered this OedipalOedipus complex dimension much more explicit, with E.T. going into Mary’s room and leaving some candy on her pillow to imply “that E.T. had a crush on Mary” (MathisonMathison, Melissa 104). One may therefore speculate that the filmmaker’s decision to cut the scene constituted an act of censorshipcensorship in the precise psychoanalyticpsychoanalysis and psychoanalytic criticism sense of an attempt to repress inadmissible desires.

Another sequence, at the end of which Elliott kisses a girl in schoolschool, not only strengthens the idea that E. T. embodies Elliott’s unconscious, but also suggests that even desiredesire itself – that seemingly innermost part of our nature – is in fact shaped at least in part by public forces. In this complex sequence, the film intercuts two different scenes: on the one hand, we see E.T. exploring the family home while everyone is away at school or work, and on the other hand we follow Elliott’s adventures in the classroom. Throughout the sequence, the telepathic link between E.T. and Elliott is emphasized, as when E.T. drinks some beer that he discovers in the fridge, which leaves not only him, but also Elliott notably inebriated (with E.T. bumping into the kitchen cabinet, and Elliott winking at a pretty girl and then slowly sliding off his chair, onto the classroom floor). Both the alien and the boy eventually recover their wits, and we see E.T. watching TVTV while Elliott is now in biology classclass, where he and his classmates are expected to anesthetize frogs and then to dissect them. Elliott, however, when looking at the helpless, lonely frog on his desk, is suddenly reminded of E.T.; muttering “Save him” to himself, the boy first frees his own frog and then proceeds to liberate the others (MathisonMathison, Melissa 88) – which, unsurprisingly, leads to chaos in the classroom. The film now cuts back to E.T. watching TV, and we find him watching a “soppy lovelove scene” from the movie The Quiet Man (MathisonMathison, Melissa 90). E.T. watches engrossed as the male protagonist grabs the arm of his female counterpart, pulling her close in a dramatic sweep and kissing her as passionately as only movie heroes can. Next, we return to the classroom, where Elliott will soon re-enact this heterosexualheterosexual fantasyfantasy scenario with the pretty girl he had winked at earlier on. The scene thus bears out Slavoj ŽižekŽižek, Slavoj’s claim that cinema “doesn’t give you what you desire; it tells you how to desire” (The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema) – which in turn implies that our desires are to some extent alien to ourselves, shaped and mediated in crucial ways by the publicpublic spaces mediamedia discourses to which we are exposed even in the privacyprivacy of our homes.33

It is at this point that we must note that E.T.’s role as a representationrepresentation of Elliott’s unconscious shifts from being at first associated with the IdId (e.g. OedipalOedipus complex desiredesire) to becoming an embodiment of the super-egosuper-ego. If E.T., in the beginning, provides Elliott merely with a mirror image of his own psychic drives, then after his death and resurrection the alien becomes an awe-inspiring, messianic figure who urges Gertie to “[b]e good,” and who thus voices – very much in the Name of theName of the Father Lacanian Father – the moral imperative commonly associated with the super-ego (HomerHomer, Sean 57–58; Thurschwell 48). In passing, we may observe that E.T. tells only the female child to be good, and that this is perhaps due to the misogynistmisogyny biasbias that Phyllis DeutschDeutsch, Phyllis detects in SpielbergSpielberg, Steven’s film (12–13). More importantly, for the time being, we must note that E.T.’s death is the moment when the telepathic link between the alien and Elliott is finally broken, as if to emphasize that the boy has now moved beyond his earlier, narcissisticnarcissism identification with the double or mirror-image, and instead accepted the symbolic call of a newfound father figure.34 It is precisely such intimate notions as desire and the uncannyuncanny, as well as the question of how the father’s material and symbolic position within the familial home relates to wider socio-historical contexts, which will be explored in detail in the discussion of William FaulknerFaulkner, William’s Absalom, Absalom! in chapter four.