| Oedipal triangles
and the desires they incite |
| Mother +
Father |
(Boy) Child:
1: desire for the mother as the source of pleasure (breast-feeding, early
care and attention); anxiety felt when withdrawn from mother by a father
with prior claims and huge size; rivalry with the father; hatred of the
'all-powerful' father, fearful, antagonism): fear takes a certain formà
castration anxiety: that you will lose the penis, the source of pleasure,
as a punishment by the father
2: (second stage:) identification with the father (idealization, admiration)
as great; you desire to be just like this ideal father; but, since you fall
short, you attack yourself
3: Conflict between responses 1 + 2 = ambivalence Often a male's ambivalence
is expressed in films and novels by splitting the father into two types:
the good benevolent, admirable father, the evil, punishing, dangerous father.
Normal
resolution of Oedipus complex: give up desire for mother, antagonism to
the father; internalize the father as ego-ideal; and transfer your desire
to another women, wife as a love-object, and become a father. |
| How are things changed when
a cyborg enters the Oedipal triangle? My hypothesis: cyborgs challenge the
traditional protocals of desire in the nuclear family, not replacing it
with some other system of desiring, but by deranging it. |
| Cyborgs Deranging
Oedipal Desire |
Shelley's Frankenstein:
During research: Monster as replacement love-object, as Frankenstein neglects
his family: after the Monster is "born", Frankenstein has the
Oedipal dream of kissing Elizabeth, who turns into the corpse of his mother.
Monster's Oedipal desire: the Delancys, and the request to be part of this
ideal, happy family.
Monster's return to Frankenstein as bad father: anger and demand. The first
act is to be the bad and castrating father, by murdering William. The demand
for a wife and a demand that he can be inserted into the family, be a father
and husband, etc.
With Frankenstein's destruction of the mate, the Monster promise to "be
with you on your wedding night", not to kill Frankenstein the creator,
but to block him from having the pleasure of possession of Elizabeth the
cousin-mother.
How does monster interrupt Frankensteins normal Oedipal trajectory? By the
end of the book, both monster and Frankenstein are rival brothers, roaming
the arctic, cut off from the warmth of any family life. The reader and the
frame narrator, Robert Walton, are put in the judicial position of evaluating
these problematic rivals. |
|
The Terminator
read by Jonathan Goldberg
Pumping Iron and multiple orgasms: a narcissistic closure between the
body builder and his/her image separates this synthetic cyborg body from
any link to the social.
The time travel family: Sarah Connor (mother); Kyle Reese (father); John
Connor (son, JC): through time travel the son can send his friend/father
back to save his mother on a mission that kills the father. While fulfilling
this Oedipal fantasy, it also entains a deep entanglement with the cyborg.
For it is only because the Terminator is being sent back to destroy the
mother, that the father is sent back.
How complicated by the Terminator? Goldberg counters the humans versus
cyborg humanist reading in several ways: by noting how Sarah as love object
depends upon the photograph and tape recorder that tell her story in the
future; how the anti-reproductive, anti mothering terminator is also Arnold
Schwarenegger: and thus, not the end of the human, but another form of
the human: powerful, relentless, cop-destroying and hard. He operates
in a s/m economy, rather than one of hedonistic pleasure or domestic romance.
He, as much as Reese, becomes Sarah's teacher and counter-point. After
the arrival of the cyborg, it difficult to go back to the old Oedipal
romance of Daddy-Mommy-Me.
|
|
Alien
Company (father), Mother (the withholding computer "mother"),
and the Crew (the brothers and sisters who squabble)
The whole film is organized thematically and visually around a womb like
opposition between safe interior/ dangerous exterior; the key moments
are those of hatching and expulsion, of a dangerous and taumatic birthing.
The one who lives is the one who gets to stay on the safe inside.
What role Ash? He is the apparent team member science officer, who in
fact represents the bad parents of this mission: those who make the crew
expendable because of the revised priority: taking the alien in as a useful
new species.
What is the gender of the monster? It's snake like form at birth, its
retractable iron teeth, its armoured hood-like head, its serpent like
tail, its fighting prowess all make it seem to be an ultra-phallic male.
The alien has the terrible power of the castrating father in the Oedipal
myth.
Ripley's achieves victory and peace (in the lyrical final going to bed/womb,
along side the cat, Jones,) by removing herself from the first site of
Oedipal struggle (the Company's ship), and then blasting the alien into
space. The pleasure of the ending comes from the autonomy-effect of removal
from all social entanglements and Oedipal rivals--even that between species.
Why does the woman defeat the alien? The challenge the alien poses is
that of reproduction run out of control (like the Insect invasions of
the 1950s monster movies: their size and aggressivity is an expression
of the way the atom bomb as unsettled the rules of nature). Since the
woman is closer to reproduction, to the mystery of birth, she is the one
who can take on the alien species.
|
Dracula
What is the Oedipal role of Count Dracula? |