Lacanian Solving a Spellbound Puzzle: Dali’s Dream Sequence

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The Salvador Dali designed dream sequence forms the core of Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945). As a subversive core of the film, occupying the radically ex-centric site through which the film surface is transfigured, Dalí’s narrative and imagery traverse and make possible the film surface. In the dream sequence, the film audience comes to see successive white feminine imageries until we are exposed to a huge white stone statue as a feminine bone standing in the most Delta-like space. As (Freudian) das Ding, the bone stuck in the real Constance’s throat makes the real Constance’s interpretation/discourse of J.B.’s dream disintegrate in her mouth or in the film itself.
In this paper, I explore how Constance’s interpretation of John Ballantine’s dream can be read in different ways considering Dalí’s sur-realistic and paranoiac logic. If we track out the missing scenes cut from the finished film by Hitchcock’s edit, we can get more clues to interpret Dalí’s narrative. Particularly, I will examine how the famous Dalí’s dream sequence can be linked to the notion of the gaze which cuts through the Eye (the I) and thus opens up the narcissistic enclosure of the Cartesian cogito, in psychoanalytic terms.

참고문헌 (Reference)

1 Žižek, Slavoj, "The Sublime Object of Ideology" Verso 1989

2 Etherington-Smith, Meredith, "The Persistence of Memory: A Biography Of Dalí" Da Capo P 1995

3 Žižek, Slavoj, "The Metastases of Enjoyment: six essays on women and causality" Verso 2005

4 Peucker, Brigitte, "The Material Image: Art and the Real in Film" Stanford UP 2007

5 Lacan, Jacques, "The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis" Norton 1977

6 Hecht, Ben, "Spellbound: screenplay"

7 Irigaray, Luce, "Speculum of The Other Woman" Cornell UP 1974

8 Bigwood, James, "Solving a Spellbound Puzzle" 72 (72): 34-40, 1991

9 Buñuel, Luis, "My Last Sigh" U Of Minnesota P 2003

10 Žižek, Slavoj, "Lacan: the Silent Partners" Verso 2006

11 Cohen, Tom, "Hitchcock's Cryptonymies. Vol. 1" U of Minnesota P 2005

12 Paini, Dominique, "Hitchcock and Art: Fatal Coincidences" Mazzotta 2000

13 Žižek, Slavoj, "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock)" Verso 1992

14 Robert, William, "Decreation, or Saying Yes" 23 (23): 59-85, 2005

15 Ades, Dawn, "Dalí’s Optical Illusions" Yale UP 2000

16 King, Elliott H., "Dalí, Surrealism and Cinema" Oldcastle Books 2007

17 Cochran, Sara, "Dalí & Film" Tate Publishing 2007

18 김미정, "Che Vuoi? Beyond the Cartesian Space in Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound" 문학과영상학회 14 (14): 135-166, 2013

19 Sartre, Jean-Paul, "Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology" Citadel P 1964

20 Pomerance, Murray, "An Eye for Hitchcock" Rutgers UP 2004