As any psychoanalyst can confirm, one rarely encounters perverse subjects in one’s consultation room. Perverse thoughts and acts, on the other hand, are more than common. Within cinema, the same is true. While many films depict perverse acts and thoughts in some way or another, films that offer an insight in the perverse subjective structure are quite rare.
Even films that one can consider as explorations of perversion are, in most cases, merely neurotic phantasmatic constructions about the pervert. Luckily, some of these neurotic filmic phantasies do succeed in offering audiences a glance at the logic of the perverse subject. Watcher In The Attic, the middle entry in Noboru Tanaka’s Showa Era Trilogy, is such a gem that allows the spectator to differentiate between the pervert and the perverted neurotic (General-note 1, general-note 2). To be able to elucidate this distinction, one must read the narrative, up until unreconcilable contradictions arise, by assuming that Goda Saburo (Renji Ishibashi), the main character of the film, is perversely structured.
The best way to make any headway in Tanaka’s narrative is by posing the following question: What does Saburo Goda, as voyeur, want to see? It is not, as many spectators will readily assume, the sexual act he hopes to glance at. What he, as pervert, wants to see is the object as absence. In each sexual encounter Goda gazes at, he hopes to see the female subject in her state of lack, as missing the phallic object (Psycho-note 1).
Yet, we should not assume, like good neurotics do, that the sexual partner of the female subject (e.g. Pierrot (Shiro Yumemura), the priest, …) possesses what she is missing. For the voyeur, the only partner that is important is himself. It is Goda, as voyeur, as absent gaze, that offers the female Other the object that completes her and ensures her private jouissance. Within the mind of voyeur, the sexual partner, if present, only arouses the orgasmic pleasure of the woman because he, as instrument of her enjoyment, is present in the small hole in the ceiling.
While the neurotic can enjoy the mere peeking at sexual acts, the pervert can only do so by turning himself into the central element that animates the female Other’s circuit of enjoyment. The voyeur must become the object, the gaze, that obstructs the hole in the female Other and causes her private jouissance. It is only by plugging this hole with his eye(s) – turning himself in the veiled presence of the gaze – that he can realize himself as the instrument of her enjoyment. It is, moreover, only by becoming such instrument that the passive voyeur can transform the female subject, devoted to the jouissance of her body, into an object of pleasure – he seizes the other as pornographic imageagainst his will.
Watcher in The Attic eventually runs aground on a phantasmatic oddity: the absence of any subjective effect by Minako (Naomi Fujiyama)’s discovery of Goda’s peering eye. Yet, while this peculiarity – the lack of any kind of subjective destabilization – reveals Watcher in The Attic as a neurotic fantasy, it does not allow us to oust Goda as a neurotic.
Yet, how can we resolve this contradiction? Even though Noboru Tanaka visually implies that Minako and Goda’s eyes interlock with each other, the lack of any kind of destabilization forces us to argue that, despite Minako being conscious of his presence, Goda’s eyes never actually meet hers. In the game of peering gazes, Goda seemingly succeeds in safeguarding his presence as an absent gaze, as the cause of her enjoyment.
Minako’s discovery of the peering eye confronts with the following question: Why does Minako let herself be subjected to this gaze as she devotes herself to her own bodily jouissance? In our view, she seizes the possibility of Goda’s presence as eye to perform a sexual fantasy for the gazing Other. Minako, as neurotic, transforms the presence of the Other into an element in her fantasy, an element to sexually exploit – to turn her on – and to seduce through masturbation.
The act that introduces the irresolvable contradiction and, thus, betrays Goda as a simple neurotic is the phantasmatic sexual play he tries to engage in with the prostitute. By transforming what he gazed at (i.e. the sexual play between Minako and Pierrot) into a scenario in which he assumes the role of the clown, forces the role of Minako on the prostitute, and perforates the shoji with his finger, Goda reveals that he cannot establish himself as the object that causes the female Other’s sexual enjoyment. He gazes in the full knowledge that there is little to no correlation to his gazing and the sexual jouissance the gazed-at-women display.
The same phantasmatic act allows us to explain the true aim of Goda’s voyeuristic behaviour and elucidate why Goda and Minako are, in essence, the same kind of human being. The fact that Goda, who is defined by a lack of sexual pleasure, displays a surge of enjoyment during the sexual play with the prostitute implies that his struggle concerns the mediating dimension of fantasy. He fails to keep the flame of his desire alight because he has no fantasy to stir it up.
Goda’s turn to voyeurism is thus nothing other than a neurotic attempt to gather fantasies to frame and arouse his sexual desire. His gazing is an attempt to discover what kind of object a woman desires and his eager assumption of Pierrot’s role in the brothel is nothing other than a first attempt at putting into practice of what, in his perception, Minako desires.
Minako is, on the other hand, introduced as a woman who consumes sexual fantasies in a metonymically aggressive manner. By putting these fantasies in practice, she does not merely aim to indulge in sexual pleasure – to erase her subjective emptiness by arousing the fullness of orgasmic pleasure, but also to continually support her desire to be sexually desired by the male Other.
Goda and Minako are, in this sense, two neurotic subjects who seek in perverse fantasies and acts the support for their desire to be desired by the Other. While Goda mistakenly perceive the object of desire in the ironic visualization of the phallus – the clown, he adjusts his trajectory by identifying with Minako’s phallic position and reproducing her transgressive act. They meet, with devastating effects, each other as phantasmatic phallus, the object-of-desire – Goda, the provider of semen, and Minako, the donor of blood. The evocative finale of Watcher In The Attic reduplicates the reveal of Goda as neurotic by staging the shocking – no pun intended – Freudian fact that sin, in the shape of perverse fantasies and acts, are part and parcel of neurotic subjectivity.
What stands out in the composition of Watcher in The Attic are the shots that aim to equate the voyeur as gaze with the external look of the spectator. This stylistic blending of perspectives – of the pervert and the neurotic – forces the spectator to partake in the pervert’s private theatre, yet does not erase the distance between him/her and the screen, which stages the voyeuristic fantasy.
The temporary merging of perspectives does not, as some would assume, equate the perspectives of the pervert and the neurotic but emphasizes the radical difference between them. The neurotic spectator can only find pleasure in Goda’s voyeuristic acts by being conscious of the phantasmatic frame, while the perverse spectator can not, as there is no way to be physically present as the gaze within the theatrical space – the screen disallows him from making his fantasy real and cause the Other’s enjoyment.
The diverging of perspectives within the visual composition corroborates the false equivalence between the neurotic spectator and the perverse voyeur. The point from where the neurotic spectator enjoys the sexual scenes – from his lazy seat in front of the screen – can never coincide with the point from where the voyeur enjoys – as an unseen gaze present within a hole in the ceiling. The shots that offer the spectator a crack to peek through – i.e. the frame within the frame-shots – underline that the neurotic enjoys the game of veiling and unveiling by assuming the position of the pervert in a phantasmatic way.
To summarize, the neurotic spectator extracts pleasure from movies because the distance between him and the screen reduces the filmic narrative to a phantasmatic construction. This distance, by turning the pervert in a phantasmatic figure, allows the neurotic to enjoy the pervert’s phantasmatic scenarios, enacted as real. The shots that turn the voyeur into the object of the spectator’s gaze have no other aim than to offer the pervert as a phantasmatic object so that the neurotic can erotically invest into the narrative and the depicted perverse acts. While the ‘distant’ screen enables the neurotic to voyeuristically enjoy the filmic narrative, the cinematic screen is a radical obstacle for the voyeur, short-circuiting any attempt to be present as an absent gaze.
With Watcher In The Attic, Noboru Tanaka delivers an unconventional pink-film masterpiece. While the unconventional nature of the film might put off some spectators, leading them to misinterpret Goda’s subjective position or rendering them unable to find the key to give the slow-paced meandering narrative its thematical direction, it is this unconventional approach that allows Tanaka to deliver one of the clearest explorations of the radical difference between the neurotic and the pervert.
Notes
General-note 1: Watcher In The Attic is loosely based on a short story by Edogawa Ranpo. The screenplay was written by Akio Ido.
General-note 2: The two other films in Tanaka’s Showa Era trilogy are A Woman Called Sada Abe (1975) and Beauty’s Exotic Dance: Torture! (1977).
Psycho-note 1: One narrative element that can only be commonly found in subjects with a perverse structure is the problematic relation to the father. Quite early in the film, in a conversation with a priest and another woman living in the boarding house, Goda underlines the personal inadequacy of the fatherly instance, the Other of the law. It is not, as the priest implies, that God has forsaken him – the refusal by the father, but that he believes he must arrange his own salvation – the refusal of the father.