Lisa Downing (University of Exeter)
On the Fantasy of Childlessness as Death in Psychoanalysis and in
Roeg's 'Don’t Look Now' (1973) and von Trier's 'Antichrist' (2009)
In two short essays (1911, 1912), on the psychoanalytic significance of the eroticised fantasy of a couple dying together, British psychoanalyst Ernest Jones argued that the unconscious meaning of this desired mutual suicide is intimately related to its opposite: conception and giving birth. In particular, the childless couple discussed in Jones’s second essay “An Unusual case of ‘dying together’” are understood to have conceived their suicide pact as an alternative to the conception of a child that their barren status prevented.
In this paper I shall examine two films that represent the literal loss of a child as productive of the death of one or both of the mourning parents. The first of these is the classic narrative horror film Don’t Look Now (Nicolas Roeg, 1973). The second is the recent, controversial Antichrist (Lars von Trier, 2009), which mirrors several of the earlier film’s generic and thematic features, despite its radically experimental form and indeterminate ethical framework. The aim of this paper will not be a psychoanalytic analysis of the representation of children, loss, sex and death in the two films, along the lines of Jones’s excurses, but rather a meditation upon the ethico-political significance of the posited link within the narratives of both classic psychoanalysis and film – including a very contemporary film – between childlessness and parental death.
Drawing on Lee Edelman’s critique of the ideology of ‘reproductive futurity’ in No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004), I argue that the hegemony of the figure of the reproductive heterosexual couple is so weighted in our culture as to conjure the spectre of death as the underside of the ‘ideal’ of childbearing, or as a punishment for failing to make the ultimate, societally-approved use of sexuality. Thus, in both the films discussed and in Jones’s psychoanalytic papers, nihilism is underpinned by thwarted futurity; while procreation is haunted with the spectre of loss and self-defeat. The meaning of this link between childlessness and eroticised parental death for modern cultural representation emerges in my reading as a complex effect of the operation of (hetero)normative ideology, rather than as a primary or primordial unconscious association.
In this paper I shall examine two films that represent the literal loss of a child as productive of the death of one or both of the mourning parents. The first of these is the classic narrative horror film Don’t Look Now (Nicolas Roeg, 1973). The second is the recent, controversial Antichrist (Lars von Trier, 2009), which mirrors several of the earlier film’s generic and thematic features, despite its radically experimental form and indeterminate ethical framework. The aim of this paper will not be a psychoanalytic analysis of the representation of children, loss, sex and death in the two films, along the lines of Jones’s excurses, but rather a meditation upon the ethico-political significance of the posited link within the narratives of both classic psychoanalysis and film – including a very contemporary film – between childlessness and parental death.
Drawing on Lee Edelman’s critique of the ideology of ‘reproductive futurity’ in No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004), I argue that the hegemony of the figure of the reproductive heterosexual couple is so weighted in our culture as to conjure the spectre of death as the underside of the ‘ideal’ of childbearing, or as a punishment for failing to make the ultimate, societally-approved use of sexuality. Thus, in both the films discussed and in Jones’s psychoanalytic papers, nihilism is underpinned by thwarted futurity; while procreation is haunted with the spectre of loss and self-defeat. The meaning of this link between childlessness and eroticised parental death for modern cultural representation emerges in my reading as a complex effect of the operation of (hetero)normative ideology, rather than as a primary or primordial unconscious association.
