TONY WU
Seeing Through John Malkovich First, I will examine the implication of doubling on the part of the spectator, drawing upon psychoanalysis-related apparatus theory. Christian Metz argues that the cinematic signifier is imaginary, a presence-absence, for the object proper is absent while its replica is present3. As a result, cinema is a mirror that does not reflect the spectator’s own body4. The absence of the spectator’s reflection necessitates the spectator to already understand herself as a subject, distinct from and relative to her others/objects; the absence also prevents her self-identification5. Nonetheless, the spectator must identify, and the absence implies that she is “entirely on the side of the perceiving,” as “all-perceiving”, identifying others with “[herself ] as a pure act of perception”6. The prerequisite of this mode of identification, which Metz has termed primary identification, is “the subject’s knowledge” of being the one who is perceiving, whose sensory organs respond to the film7 (original emphasis). On the other hand, in terms of secondary identification, the spectator can identify with the diegetic characters, and by extension the actors or actresses who play the characters8. Primary and secondary identification, however, do not exhaust the practice of cinematic spectatorship. The spectator is also a voyeur, whose pleasure, by virtue of her voyeuristic act of looking, is derived from looking at objects that are kept away from her9. Her gaze is voyeuristic, for the cinematic signifier is imaginary and the perceived is entirely absent when the spectator is present10. Similarly, Laura Mulvey argues that cinema affords at least two forms of pleasures to its spectator: scopophilic, which is predicated upon a separation of the spectator and her objects; and narcissistic, in identifying with her ideal ego11. Conflation Of Identification And Cinematic Voyeurism In Malkovich, the portal that is somehow linked to Malkovich allows the user to turn the body of Malkovich into a surrogate for cinema. Namely, the person in the portal is like a film spectator and Malkovich’s eyes become the camera, the screen, and the projector; what she sees and hears is the cinematic text. What Malkovich
28