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Hitchcock Annual (1993) - Male Subjectivity at the Margins

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Review of "Male Subjectivity at the Margins" by Kaja Silverman (ISBN 0415904196)

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Male Subjectivity at the Margins. Kaja Silverman. New York & London: Routledge, 1992. 447 pages. $55.00 cloth. $16.95 paper.

Reviewed by TONY WILLIAMS

Kaja Silverman is one of America's most profound and stimulating theorists. Though demanding careful attention and constant re-reading, her work is neither willfully obscurantist nor jargon-ridden. Conscious of the continuing survival of the Oedipal trajectory within both contemporary life and artistic representations, Silverman constantly searches for oppositional elements located within the very heart of the enemy camp. This particularly includes certain marginal masculine entities refusing incorporation within patriarchal securities. Male Subjectivity at the Margins is a collection of articles, some new and some updated to consider new material relevant to its title. Although only mentioning one Hitchcock film once (52), Silverman's arguments are extremely relevant to any examination of the "Master's Text," a corpus which many have shown to contain less control and more revealing instabilities.

Despite recent critiques of the Freudian paradigm by supposedly progressive clinical theorists,1 it is clearly obvious to those confronting contemporary social and historical formations and narratives that traditional patriarchal "master narratives" still remain active in uncongenial and oppressive forms. Recognizing the present hegemony of what she terms the "dominant fiction" (or the classical Oedipal trajectory influencing both subjectivities and narrative patterns), Silverman searches for those oppositional moments of disruption whose future re...

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Tony Williams is Associate Professor of Cinema Studies at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. He has authored a recent book on Jack London film adaptations and co-edited Vietnam War Films with Jean-Jacques Malo.

Notes

  1. ↑ See Ilsa Bick's review of D.N. Rodowick, The Difficulty of Difference in Film Criticism, 17.1 (1992): 73-77. Although knowledge of recent clinical approaches is helpful, they are of little value in dealing with narratives that are predominantly Oedipal trajectories and thus open to classical Freudian hermeneutical interpretations. This leads to a heavily biased evaluation of Rodowick's methodological approach.
  2. ↑ Anthony Wilden, System and Structure: Essays in Communication and Exchange, 2nd. ed. (London: Tavistock Publications, 1984), 474.
  3. ↑ Stephen Heath, "The Turn of the Subject" Cine-Tracts, 2.3 & 4 (1979): 32-48.
  4. ↑ Tony Williams, "Oliver Stone: Less than Meets the Eye," CineAction! 29 (1992): 34-43; "Born on the Fourth of July," Society for the Philosophic Study of the Contemporary Visual Arts Newsletter II.4 (1992): 5-7.
  5. ↑ This is certainly so in particular cases involving the works of Martin Scorsese, Jules Verne, and the post-1986 work of Hong Kong director John Woo whose films certainly contain striking images of male masochism. See Tony Williams, "The Last Temptation of Christ: A Fragmented Oedipal Trajectory," CineAction! 19/20 (1990): 33-42; Jean Chesneux, The Political and Social Ideas of Jules Verne, (London: Thames and Hudson, 1972); and John Woo's A Better Tomorrow (1986), A Better Tomorrow 2 (1987), Killer (1989), A Bullet in the Head (1990) and Hard Boiled (1991).
  6. ↑ See Paul Smith ("Action Movie Hysteria, or Eastwood Bound," Differences 1.3 (1989): 106; Clint Eastwood: A Cultural Production (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 163166, 276.
  7. ↑ See Robin Wood, "Critical Positions and the End of Civilization: or A Refusal to Join the Club", Film Criticism 17.2-3 (1993): 79-92; "Why We Should (Still) Take Hitchcock Seriously," CineAction! 31 (1993): 44-49.
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