Resisting Arrest by Robert A. Rushing

Author:Robert A. Rushing [Rushing, Robert A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2021-04-28T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

—

What, then, have we learned from L’avventura and The Talented Mr. Ripley? Both films seem to require a certain kind of courage on the part of the spectator, a certain perseverance in the face of a desire that is not pinned down to the East River of Rear Window or the snowbound train of Murder on the Orient Express. Both Anna and Tom function as libidinal agents still at large, no longer subject to the “logic of arrest” that typifies more canonical instances of detective fiction, especially in its most rigorous, if not actually rigid, form in classic detective fiction. But it is not too early to notice that this other kind of detective fiction, as seen in the examples in this chapter, presents at least two faces: if we can still reasonably speak of desire and its operations in L’avventura, we inevitably turn to a consideration of drive in The Talented Mr. Ripley. Drive in that last example works like a kind of desire gone awry, entirely negative, inhuman, desubjectifying, relentless, menacing, and dismissible as alien and other, perversely the reason that film does not provoke the same anxious, restless boredom that characterizes Antonioni’s films.

Moreover, the overall structure that I’ve outlined in these last two chapters—the real of desire and the logic of arrest—duplicates the “standard” psychoanalytic reading of detective fiction, in which it is seen as a way for us to mask our desires from ourselves, to see and yet not see at the same time. And this is no doubt the case. However, it also has a different, perhaps less desirable effect: popular forms of detective fiction (Hitchcock or Christie) become “libidinally inferior” whereas high art forms that make use of the genre (Antonioni, for instance, or, to a lesser extent, Minghella) begin to function as a kind of therapy for more popular forms, demanding a confrontation with the desire that was avoided in the popular forms. In the next chapter, I will examine this issue in more detail, asking how drive in its more positive, benevolent form—that is, enjoyment—is also at work in detective fiction, and how it may complicate the traditional psychoanalytic scenario of detective fiction.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.