In Lars von Trier’s film Breaking the Waves, these words of counsel are offered to Bess McNeil by a Presbyterian clergyman after her husband has been involved in a tragic accident. This statement can also be taken as a summary of Slavoj Zizek’s interpretation of this film, and of his understanding of feminine sexuality in general.
Breaking the Waves(1996) is set in a tiny Presbyterian community on the West coast of Scotland in the 1970s. It is the story of Bess (Emily Watson), a deeply religious local girl, who marries Jan (Steelan Starsgard), an oil rig worker from outside the community. After the joy and sexual awakening of their honeymoon, Bess is devastated when Jan must return to the rig, and she prays that God will return him to her. Jan does come home early, but because he is paralyzed in an accident. Bess is plagued with guilt. When Jan asks her to have sex with other men and then describe her experiences to him, she reluctantly agrees, believing that through her sacrifice Jan will be cured.
The suffering Bess endures as she seeks to carry out Jan’s request is extensive. She experiences a great deal of pain, is shunned by her church and family, and tormented by the village children. Finally, desperate because Jan’s condition has worsened, Bess returns to a ship on which she knows a sadistic sailor will abuse her, and she is cut and beaten severely. As she lies in hospital dying, she asks her friend: “Is he not any better?” When told that Jan’s condition has not improved, Bess mutters “Oh, I thought he must be better now. Maybe I was wrong after all.” Then Bess dies in despair: “I’m afraid. Jan? Jan? I’m freezing. So wrong.....”
If the story ended here, von Trier’s film, though disturbing, might be considered a powerful and tragic narrative. In the next scene, however, one sees Jan miraculously walking around as preparations for Bess’ funeral are being made. Considered a sinner, the community refuses to bury her on consecrated ground, so Jan and his friends steal her body and bury her at sea. Later that evening, a second miracle occurs when the sky is filled by the sound of ringing church bells.
One cannot help finding this ending deeply problematic. It amounts to an all-too familiar celebration of the sacrificial suffering of a woman for a man, which is then stamped with divine approval. Reviewers in Christian journals have certainly interpreted the film in such a way, viewing Bess as a modern Christ-figure.1 Other interpreters, pointing to von Trier’s assertion that it is “a film about goodness, ”2 insist that to dismiss the end of the film as Hollywood kitch or religious cornyness is to miss the point, and that, by exaggerating conventionalism and cliche, the film “discovers an emotionally richer aesthetic vocabulary;” one that transcends the limits of realism to explore the way Bess’ excessive love upsets the natural order.3
Among those who celebrate the film in this manner is the psychoanalytic theorist Slavoj Zizek. Zizek admits that an “obvious reproach” that may be directed towards Breaking the Waves is that it is the “utmost male chauvinist film celebrating and elevating” the sacrificial role of women in society.4 He insists, however, that through Lacanian theory, one can understand that the dynamic at work is actually more complex, and that the film represents a demonstration ofLacan’s notion of feminine jouissance.
For Zizek, Bess’ actions demonstrate that the ultimate cost of love is not to remain pure, but to sin for one’s loved one. As he states it, “The highest sacrifice of love is to accept freely and willingly the role of the other through which the subject enjoys: not to suffer for the other, but to enjoy for him.”5 The love Bess has for Jan is an excessive attachment to him. She cannot accept the restrictions and limits that social obligations put on their relationship. Her sin is that she is ready to renounce anything, if only Jan is brought back to her. After his accident, this excessive love leads her to sacrifice her own jouissance for the sake of fulfilling the desire of Jan.
According to Lacanian theory, every individual must necessarily give up some of their enjoyment - their jouissance - in order to enter into language. One signifier comes to represent this - the Phallus. Individuals experience this differently, depending upon whether they fall into a masculine or feminine structure. Those who fall within the male structure are wholly alienated within language. Masculine pleasure is limited to what is permitted within the limits of the symbolic order (language, culture), and so is restricted to phallic jouissance. Woman, however, because of her more distanced relationship to the Phallus, is not wholly defined by the symbolic order, and thus not entirely subject to it. Besides experiencing phallic jouissance, she also has access to “Other jouissance, ” which exceeds the boundaries set by language. This perspective is what leads Zizek to argue that Breaking the Waves is not a chauvinistic film. The “not-all” of Bess, that part of her which is not caught up in phallic jouissance, allows her to resist being drawn completely into male desire. She possesses “a mysterious jouissance beyond Phallus about which nothing can be said.”6
In Zizek’s conception of femininity as ‘masquerade’, woman’s identity for-others is ‘put on’ or imposed upon her by the fantasies of patriarchal society; but ‘in-herself’, woman “is a pure void that cannot be identified with any of these features.”7 The trick of feminine masquerade is to present oneself as a mask that seems to conceal a secret behind it. The allure of a woman for a man, says Zizek, is this sense of a secret or mystery, which remains forever out of reach.
For Zizek, this dynamic demonstrates that the basis of ideological mis-representation is the subjective belief that one’s innermost self is not merely the result of external mechanisms and representations. Positing the exception that ‘there is something in me more than myself’ is in fact a necessary ideological support for the phallic function of the symbolic order. This being the case, Zizek concludes that the anti-ideological gesture par excellence is an act of “subjective destitution, ” in which one renounces oneself and fully admits dependence upon external symbolic apparatuses.8 It is in this way that Zizek interprets Bess’ actions: “she undermines the phallic economy and enters the domain of feminine jouissance by way of her very unconditional surrender to it.” Whereas in the dynamics of phallic seduction a woman assumes a mask while maintaining a sense that a great Mystery lies behind it, “Bess’ sacrifice is unconditional, there is nothing Beyond.” Deprived of its required inherent transgression, the phallic economy disintegrates. Bess is subversive because of her “over-orthodox” realization of the fantasy of feminine sacrifice for male jouissance.9
In his essay “Why is Woman a Symptom of Man?” Zizek articulates this idea of the subversive act in more detail. He distinguishes between a real act and a performative activity. The former suspends the field of ideological meaning. It interrupts the symbolic order, and thus for Zizek, is feminine. Masculine activity remains under the existing psychic apparatus of reality. Even activity that criticizes or protests against the existing order is “ultimately nothing but a desperate attempt” to repair a traumatic flaw in the system.10
The feminine act is an act of absolute freedom. It is founded only in itself, and thus is empty of any positive content. For Zizek, to achieve this, is to become a “saint.”11 He describes the act of Karin in Roberto Rossellini’s film Stromboli as the achievement of a “zero point;” as “symbolic suicide.” When one is able to renounce all symbolic ties, one experiences “supreme bliss, ” and the Lacanian act is exactly this “withdrawal by means of which we renounce renunciation itself, becoming aware of the fact that we have nothing to lose in a loss.” Such an excessive encounter with the Real takes place only in “what some call the mystic experience.” Through an act, “the subject is annihilated and subsequently reborn.” To outsiders, this will appear insane, due to the radical unaccountability it enacts.12
This is how Zizek understands Bess’ act. She upsets the phallic economy because her sacrifice is excessive and unconditional. There is nothing beyond it, no secret behind her mask. Her sacrifice is not that of the hero, who surrenders herself to compensate for her Master’s (the big Other) deficiencies. Instead, Zizek implies that her act does not imply the Other as its addressee, but that it is “an act of abandonment which sacrifices the very sacrifice.”13 It allows Bess to break out of the ideological closure of the Symbolic. She is “the figure of pure absolute Faith which transcends (or rather suspends) the very gap between the big Other and jouissance.”14
This interpretation of Bess’ actions is not unlike the counsel she receives from the Presbyterian clergyman of her community: “You must show you’re strong. You have the strength your life in God has bestowed upon you, and that is a strength that he does not possess.” The difference for Zizek is merely that Bess’ strength is not the result of a religious faith, but of her access to that Other jouissance that is available to her through the feminine structure of her sexuality.
In Zizek’s theory of epistemological decenterment, the identities of individuals are produced by society’s ideological fictions. While it is impossible to escape this predicament, one can approach the non-ideological void that lies at the center of subjectivity and collective identity. For Zizek, “woman” is and represents this empty space, or the Real. She is “the symptom of man.” The structure of feminine sexuality suggests that women have an innate proximity to the void (unless, of course, they somehow operate according to the masculine structure).
Sarah Herbold argues that in Zizek’s work, women are admired from a distance for their acts of symbolic suicide, their blissful Other jouissance, which “man can only experience vicariously through woman-as-the-real.”15 While Zizek celebrates women’s acts of absolute freedom, he, as a man, is exempted from the imperative to follow their example. In this way, then, his request of women is no different than that of Jan toward Bess: go out an act excessively so I can enjoy from a safe distance.
The contrast between Zizek’s treatment of film and that of feminist scholarship is sharp one. Feminist film theorists have long analyzed the objectification of woman in western culture as representing a position of lack. Such a conclusion, however, is usually intended to demonstrate that this position is a construction imposed upon women that should be challenged. What Zizek’s argument often implies is that woman is lack.16
Many contemporary theorists find the Lacanian understanding of sexuality attractive, as it jettisons completely all ties between biological determination and sexual identity. But what Lacanian theorists often also jettison is any attention to historical development and social analysis. Sexual identity, Lacan would have his reader believe, is tied primarily to one’s relationship to language. The structure of feminine sexuality is entirely the result of the position of the Phallus in the Symbolic. Woman represents the excess of the power of the masculine, as the feminine is the void that the masculine depends upon but tries to deny. But this is to explain social reality (the objective) entirely on the basis ofan understanding of psychic reality (the subjective). Teresa Ebert correctly concludes that this effectively erases the possibility of materialism.17 Ideology becomes understood as something based on desire, rather than on the material conditions of society. The ‘traumatic kernel of the Real’, which is forever unsymbolizable, and around which desire circulates, can only be described but never explained. This diminishes critical thought to the task of description, a fact evidenced by Zizek’s practice of expounding on Lacanian doctrines, but never explaining why psychic life operates in such a fashion, or how it might be changed.
In Breaking the Waves, women are excluded from speaking during the church services: “no woman speaks here!” The same is true ofZizek’s description of Bess. He is interested in her character only insofar as she can serve as a model for Lacanian theory. But, as Tania Modleski observes, “If women are the question, they cannot ask the questions.”18 If the question of woman’s identity can be contained in some unrepresentable void, then the lives of women cannot challenge the doctrines of the great Master.
In the film, Bess finally becomes so annoyed by the hypocrisy of a sermon about loving the divine Word, that she can be silent no longer: “I don’t understand. How can you love a word? You cannot be in love with a word. You can love another human being.” Lacanians might snicker here, and repeat the doctrine of the impossibility of the sexual relationship, but her protest highlights the concern for actual women, rather than simply the psychic term woman, that this paper raises.
Zizek’s distance from such a concern is especially evident in the way he resolves the central tensions of the film. For Zizek, the key to Breaking the Waves is the sharp contrast between the narrative story and the way the movie if shot; between content and form. The narrative, he claims, is “ridiculously Romantic, pathetic, excessive.” But the documentary-like manner in which the story is filmed, in jerky hand-held camera shots, “understates...the excessive pathos of the content.”19 Von Trier explains his use of this stylistic device in the following manner: “If Breaking the Waves had been rendered with a conventional technique, I don’t think you could have tolerated the story.” Otherwise, “it would have been far too suffocating. You would not have been able to stand it. What we’ve done is to take a style and put it over the story like a filter.”20 Bess’ agony, in other words, in rendered palpable by manipulating the form through which the narrative is presented. As Zizek states, “the only way for the spectator to accept the story as it is, is to encode it in a form which annuls and contests it - to submit it to a kind of dreamwork.”21
One must reply, however: why should the audience want to accept this story ‘as it is’? Why are von Trier and Zizek so concerned to protect the story’s content? What would it mean to reject the content of the narrative? In her groundbreaking essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, ” Laura Mulvey argues that the political use of psychoanalytic theory for feminist film criticism is to demonstrate “the way the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form.” This is not Zizek’s interest; thus, while in many ways his analyses of films are, like Mulvey’s, concerned with demonstrating that “an idea of woman stands as linchpin to the system: [that] it is her lack that produces the phallus as a symbolic presence, ”22 Zizek’s sole political interest behind such observations is simply to illustrate Lacanian theories, notto criticize how certain interests structure a film’s form.
American film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum observes that in Breaking the Waves, von Trier “heaps on so many layers ofpostmodernist irony about truth and faith that isolating any form of belief or disbelief from the resulting tangle becomes impossible: style becomes almost everything, content next to nothing.”23 This film deliberately mutes Bess’ suffering, and intentionally avoids exploring the motivations behind her excessive actions. Such an analysis would blur the ‘purity’ of her act, and, therefore, complicate von Trier’s desire to present some Platonic understanding of ‘Goodness’ as well as Zizek’s interest in excessively “pure authentic belief.”24
In Theory of Film, Siegried Kracauer compares film criticism to the myth ofPerseus and the Medusa. Like Perseus looking at the fearful creature’s reflection on his polished shield, Kracauer argues that cinema holds up a mirror to nature, allowing the audience to confront actual horrors that would normally petrify it when encountered in real life. The images on the screen, he continues, “are means to an end; they are to enable-or, by extension, induce - the spectator to behead the horror they mirror.”25
Breaking the Waves is a film that purposely clouds the shield of Athena in order to annul the content of its disturbing images. Rather than challenge this, Zizek celebrates it. He reads the miraculous appearance ofthe bells in the sky at the end of the film asa “postmodern appendix to an otherwise tragic modernist existential drama of Faith.” For Zizek, what characterizes postmodernism is precisely that one can return to a pre-modern “enchanted universe” in which miracles effectively do occur, as an aesthetic spectacle, without “really believing it, ” but also without any ironic or cynical distance.26
One can find consolation in this un-ironic distance only by ignoring Bess’ terrible suffering; only by shielding the audience from the content of the narrative.
No monster is beheaded through such an interpretation, and no insight into historical experience is achieved; for if the audience is neither to believe in the miracles, nor concern itself with the story’s content, what exactly is there to celebrate about the film? Zizek suggests that the film should “be read as a meditation on the difficulty, impossibility even, of Belief today.”27 Pure authentic belief, he says, can only exist in contrast to a closed orthodox religious community. In modern society, in which there is no God or fixed obligations, there is also no space for “authentic Transgression.”
Such a perspective demonstrates the extent to which Zizek’s study of Hegel and Schelling has absorbed their idealism. His analysis is concerned with an idea of “authentic Transgression” rather than particular instances of suffering andresistance. A further example ofhis idealistic treatment ofhistorical events is found in a reference to the Chernobyl accident. In this discussion, Zizek seeks to avoid simplistic and extremist responses to the ecological crisis by proposing that the remedy is to “learn to accept the real of the ecological crisis in its senseless actuality, without charging it with some message or meaning.”28
Because human beings, by entering into language are necessarily split, and therefore, “derailed, ” all attempts to repair the irreducible gaps in the symbolic order are destined to fail. Occasionally, the Real will ‘return’ and interrupt the contingent constructions that are erected to systematize and provide these gaps with meaning. For Zizek, Chernobyl was such an occurrence; it represented “the intrusion of a radical contingency” that reminded society of the “frailty of the symbolic edifice.” The radio active rays, because unrepresentable, were “chimeral objects, effects of the incidence of the discourse of science upon our world.”29
Surely Chernobyl is more significant for alerting us of dangers to human life than for highlighting the ‘frailty of the symbolic edifice’. But Zizek’s discussion makes no mention of the historical and political forces that support nuclear energy, or the social contexts in which such facilities are constructed and maintained. The Chernobyl disaster is treated as if independent of history, so that it serves as an instrument for illustrating Zizek’s mystification of the Real.30 Deadly radiation is an “effect of discourse, ” not of socio-poltical forces. In event is treated as but one example of the periodic return of the Real, not as the product of human error and economic decline. One must ask: should observers of this disaster simply conclude that one is to “accept the real, ” andrecognize one’s status as an “impotent witness, ” or might not the accident suggest more adequate responses on the part ofthe social theorist?
This challenge to Zizek’s work and his interpretation of Breaking the Waves is not to suggest that one can achieve a ‘God’s eye view’ that establishes a transparent dualism between reality ‘as-it-truly-is’ and ideology; but it is to suggest that ideology critique cannot be limited to a descriptive account of shifts within discourse and desire. Zizek’s account of ideology, however, focuses on the idea that reality is never whole; society is always structured around something non-symbolizable. The “irreducible plurality of particular struggles” in society are all “responses to the same impossible-real kernel.”31 This conception of the psychic Real is understood to produce traumatic social effects. Social contradictions are explained in terms of their being symptoms for the repressed Real, which is produced by the subject. The basis for a critique of ideology from an extra-ideological point of reference, therefore, “is not ‘reality’ but the ‘repressed’ real of antagonism.”32 ‘Reality, ’ claims Zizek, is merely the “field of symbolically structured representations;” the object for analysis is the surplus the eludes the grasp of the symbolic, the “stain” or “hole in reality” where “the word fails.”33
If the object of analysis is an empty signifier that does not signify anything, but merely transfixes the gaze of the psychoanalytic theorist like female characters in Hitchcock’s movies transfix the male gaze, then little attention will be given to objective social reality, for it is now merely a series of effects produced by the traumatic kernel of the Real. The theorist might be freed from any fear of having His pleasure restricted by social context - “enjoy your symptom” - but little insight will be gained into the social forces that impact upon the lives of most people. Thus, Zizek is not really interested in Bess’ character or her struggles. He is simply fascinated by the void that he thinks lies behind her self sacrifice.
The last paragraph of Zizek’s remarks about Breaking the Waves is characteristically contradictory. The “ultimate lesson” of the movie, he says, is that Bess should not have become so excessively attached to Jan. In Lacanian terms, she should have accepted his castration (that he is not the Phallus), and her psychotic fate is the result of this failure. Here Bess is no longer the saint she was portrayed to be earlier in the essay; gone is any celebration of ‘subjective destitution’ or subversive ‘authentic faith’. Instead, it is her own distorted desire that is to blame for her suffering. Like the movie’s character Dr. Richardson, Zizek is unable to come to terms with Bess’ actions.
At the medical inquiry after Bess dies, Dr. Richardson is asked for the cause of death. Initially he replies: she was Good. When this diagnosis is met with raised eyebrows, the doctor quickly retracts his remark, and concludes: she was an “immature, unstable person, ” suffering from an “exaggerated, perverse form of sexuality.” Perhaps the contradictory position within Zizek’s article reveals that he, too, is uncomfortable responding to Bess’ tragedy either with celebration or by dismissing her as insane. This hesitation bears witness to the difficulty of muting Bess’ suffering, which not even von Trier’s manipulative cinematic form successfully stifles. This is Bess’ final protest, and it is the real strength that he (Zizek) does not possess: not even the film’s creator, nor her learned interpreter, are able to silence her voice.
Notes
- 1 Heath, Stephen, “God, Faith and Film: Breaking the Waves, ” Literature & Theology, vol. 12. No. 1, (March 1998) pp. 93-107. The movie was the subject of a panel at the 1997 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion.
- 2 Bjoerkman, Stig, “Naked Miracles: An Interview with Lars von Trier, ” Sight and Sound vol. 6. Issue 10 (October 1996), 12.
- 3 Nelson, Victoria, “The New Expressionism: Why the Bells Ring in Breaking the Waves, ” Salmagundi no. 116-117 (Fall/Winter 1997) pp. 228-237.
- 4 Zizek, Slavoj, “Femininity between Goodness and Act, ” Lacanian Ink 14 (Spring 1999), 29.
- 5 Ibid., 28.
- 6 Ibid., 29.
- 7 Zizek, The Indivisible Remainder. (London: Verso, 1996), 161.
- 8 Ibid., 166.
- 9 Zizek, “Femininity between Goodness and Act, ” 29-30.
- 10 Zizek, “Why is a Woman a Symptom of Man?” Enjoy your Symptom! (NY: Routledge, 1992), 31-67.
- 11 Ibid., 36.
- 12 Ibid., 43-44.
- 13 Ibid., 58-9.
- 14 Zizek, “Femininity between Goodness and Act, ” 31.
- 15 Herbold, Sarah, “Well-Placed Reflections: (Post)modern Woman as Symptom of (Post)modern Man, ” Signs vol. 21, no. 1 (Autumn 1995), 91.
- 16 Ibid., 106.
- 17 Ebert, Teresa L., Ludic Feminism and After. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 60.
- 18 Modleski, Tania, Feminism Without Women. (NY: Routledge, 1991), 34.
- 19 Zizek, “Femininity between Goodness and Act, ” 32-33.
- 20 “Naked Miracles, ” 12,
- 21 Zizek, Femininity between Goodness and Act, ” 33.
- 22 Mulvey, Laura, Visual and Other Pleasures. (London: MacMillan Academic and Professional Ltd, 1991), 14.
- 23 Rosenbaum, Jonathan, “Mixed Emotions: Breaking the Waves, ” Chicago Reader, 1997.
- 24 Zizek, “Femininity between Goodness and Act, ” 34.
- 25 Kracauer, Siegfreid, Theory of Film. (London: Oxford University Press, 1960), 305.
- 26 Zizek, “Femininity between Goodness and Act, ” 35.
- 27 Zizek, “Femininity between Goodness and Act, ” 34.
- 28 Zizek, Looking Awry (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), 35.
- 29 Ibid., 36.
- 30 see Teresa Ebert’s treatment of this in Ludic Feminism, pp. 62-63.
- 31 Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology. (London: Verso, 1989), 4.
- 32 see Zizek’s criticism of such a position in “”The Spectre of Ideology, “Mapping Ideology, ed. Slavoj Zizek. London: Verso, 1994). 25.
- 33 Zizek, Slavoj, ed., Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock.(London: Verso, 1992), 238-39.
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