The Return of the Gaze: Image-Consciousness in a Digital Age

The truly terrifying moment in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho is not the climax of the famous shower

scene, when the curtain is flung open to reveal a faceless figure holding a knife aloft before the

defenceless Marion Crane. It occurs after the brutal murder is committed and Crane’s screams

subside. First, the camera pans to a shot of bloody shower water as it trickles down a dark

plughole. It elicits an odd sense of satisfaction to watch all that bodily turmoil, the muddiness

of human life, go down the drain and eddy off into painless infinity. The damage is done, the

transition from life to death complete. Out of sight, out of mind. And then: the camera zooms

in until the dark plughole consumes the screen, then zooms slowly back out to reveal the pupil

of a bright eye, and then out further still to reveal the limp, expressionless face that the eye

belongs to. We are being stared at by the eye of Marian’s corpse.

This is the moment when the gaze shatters the illusion of viewership for the audience. Until

this point, we see images projected by a camera onto a big screen which takes up our entire

field of vision. We are able to ‘lose ourselves,’ and snuggle happily into the seat of attention

carved out for us by the lens, which presents us with moving images and gives us the pleasurable

sensation of being fixed subjects in a world in motion. We can ogle in reverence at the scenes

and faces we see on the screen, safe in the knowledge that they can’t see us back. And we feel

the spasm of shock when the screen looks back at us, intruding on our falsely secure sense that

we are authoritative subjects, sutured by the visual totality of the images we see. Behind

Marion’s lifeless face, there is nothing but an empty gaze. When we notice this, we are

confronted with the frightening reality that there is no one left to look at us but ourselves.

The screen, both symbolically and as a physical apparatus, serves a dual function. We can be

‘screened to’ reality, watching news events occur real time as they are captured on camera, for

example. But we can also be ‘screened from’ it, such as when we are partitioned off from a

patient in a hospital ward. The magic of the way that cinema makes us see the world is that it

is at once the purest representation of reality that we have available to us, and the most illusory.

For instance, a camera angle must assume a specific perspective, and in doing so exclude a

number of alternative specificities to present the audience with a complete image. So much is

presented, and therefore excluded, to the audience by way of surface, meaning that less is

required of the imagination. In essence, film possesses the ultimate mimetic capacity, in that it

captures sight, sound and the passage of time, but is ultimately limited in its metaphorical

potential. We are watching imagination and fantasy projected for us when watching a movie.

We are both ‘screened to’ reality and ‘screened from’ it.

We know that, often, the movies we watch are fictions constructed for us for own entertainment,

and that enjoying a film requires a certain degree of credulity. So, we opt to suspend our

disbelief, immerse ourselves, and ‘buy into’ that fiction. The difficulty lies in the

unidirectionality of the attention exchanged during watching. In a conversation with a friend

at a coffee shop, both parties might be involved in a mutual and multi-directional act of

communication. When we speak to each other, we are both talking and listening, looking and

being looked at, paying and receiving attention. When we watch a movie, we are only listening

and looking. This is the paradox. Watching a film is passive, but when we watch we become

active verbs; ‘doing’ words.

Film shows us that we gravitate towards order and structure as subjects. We might remember

a particular time and place in our life through a vivid image, just like we recount stories to

imbue a random succession of events with sequence and chronology. The Truth is revealed to

us when we manage to adequately assimilate the unpredictability and chaos of the world

around us into something neat and palatable. Images bring us closer to perfection, truthful or

not, in that they order the contingency and chaos of real lived experience into a single, static,

visual totality. Stories can only hint at the perfection we imagine of a photo or a painting or a

shot in a film. Images are real, but idealised, reflections of experience. We want the symmetry

and order we glean from visual pleasure for ourselves, and so we strive for it and often fail to

achieve it. This is why film is fantasy. We are watching our own imagination, our idealized

projection of experience, on screen.

How does this way of seeing inform and influence how we construct our own identities in the

world? The mirror differs from the screen in that it puts us in the position of viewing ourselves

as an image. But like the screen, it presents us with an idealised version of reality – we suddenly

see form in the cloud of sensation that is direct experience, and witness ourselves as a definite

shape; uniform and wholly constituted. As the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan writes it in

his seminal essay, ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I,’

The mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to

anticipation - and which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial

identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image

to a form of its totality...and, lastly, to the assumption of the armour of an alienating

identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject's entire mental

development.

For Lacan, the fascination of the infant with the reflection it sees in the mirror lies in the ability

of the image to unify the anarchic impulses and fragmented experiences of the primary self into

an exteriority which is fully formed. The mirror, to Lacan, “freezes [the self] in a symmetry

that inverts it, in opposition to the turbulent movements with which the subject feels animates

it.”

Our reflections allow us to imagine ourselves as composed, controlled and ‘put together,’ and

the mirror become a register of power and mastery that we strive to possess. Once we encounter

an image of ourselves that satisfies us, we don the ‘armour of an alienating identity,’ and, in

doing so, surrender our originating selves to the power of an identity we can only witness

externally. While our bodies and faces are turbulent and contingent surfaces in real life, subject

to changes in emotion and light and movement, we compose ourselves to look smoky and

smouldering in photos, and (meta)physically ‘make ourselves up,’ in the mirror. We cringe from

an unexpected encounter with our reflection that reveals a face contorted with laughter or a

ruffled head of hair, confronted as we are with a visual Truth which we would rather hide from.

Our experience of the world passes through the medium of the image, and no image has more

power over us than our own.

Concurrent with our increased ability to capture the moment is the commodification of the

moment itself. Images and videos have become something akin to the air we breathe in the 21st

century. Photos have lost their metaphorical weight, and therefore much of their significance.

Fifty years ago, a family photo, carefully arranged, framed and selected to sit on the mantel,

might have served as the single artefact of a more significant time and place. Now, a photo is

more likely to sit as one of many in a camera roll that has likely captured the majority of events

and experiences of a human life. Even while images have assumed primary importance as a

medium through which we perceive reality and collect memories, the weight and meaning of

the reality to which a photo refers has diminished.

A photo is no longer a mediation of reality, but instead an end to which we strive in our lived

experience. We imagine our lives in constant anticipation of a moment or event which might

be worth capturing. We want to be ‘caught on camera,’ eternally posing for a candid photo or

video which will capture, and remember, the moment for us. The ‘main character moment,’

like ‘acting natural,’ is the oxymoron of today, symptomatic as it is both of a modern hyper-

awareness of the need to ‘perform’ for the camera, and a simultaneous longing for a state of

consciousness which relinquishes itself from the grip of external perception.

Today, we are constantly seeing ourselves represented virtually by the screen. We are spoon

fed snippets of image in constant, specially curated streams of content that we are free to access

at will. We have technology at our disposal that allows us to capture every moment as it is lived.

We have filters that feed us with the satisfaction we crave in the illusion of a perfected self-

image. We are constantly looking at screens, and yet we are more ‘screened from’ reality than

ever. Being out in the world gives us the power of to navigate the clumsiness of human

interaction, and strengthens us to the social reality of the stage. Behind a screen, on the other

hand, we are only onlookers; passive voyeurs to a visually perfect and seamlessly recreated

world that calcifies the comfortable armour of our alienating identities into a shell which

shatters on contact with air.

Movies have long lost their status as the principal unit of entertainment consumption or cultural

representation of today, and have become more like the nostalgic relics of a less mediated past.

Rather than offering us a reprieve from the Real World, to watch a movie now is more like a

chance to reconnect with it, revere the magic of the screen and revel in the pleasure of the

image that has been lost amidst the fragmentation of the modern experience. What we can

learn from Psycho is what is revealed in the darkness of Marian’s pupil, staring back at us from

the floor of the bathroom at the Bates Motel. Behind the images we see on screen, of others

and of ourselves, there is nothing but an empty gaze. By overcoming the fear of relinquishing

the self to the judgement of the anticipatory, visually mediated ‘other’ that we constantly see

reflected back to us, we might find freedom in the realisation that there is no gaze looking back

at us but our own.