Abstract
This essay examines music in two Arthurian films: John Boorman’s Excalibur (USA 1981), and the television miniseries Mists of Avalon (USA 2001), directed by Uli Edel. It explores the role of music in the nostalgic desire evoked by the medieval in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century film. From a perspective informed by Lacanian understandings of desire and its lost object (objet (petit) a), the essay argues that the music in these two films works to sustain a nostalgic fantasy of the medieval as a paradisal home lost in a cataclysmic Fall.
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This essay examines music in two Arthurian films: John Boorman’s Excalibur (USA 1981), and the television miniseries Mists of Avalon (USA 2001), directed by Uli Edel. It is part of a larger attempt to explore the role played by music in the nostalgic desire evoked by the medieval in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century recordings, novels and films. I argue that these artefacts of medievalism support the fantasy of a lost home or time before a Fall and that language is at the heart of the loss. Julia Kristeva, like Jacques Lacan, associates language with a process of castration, which she defines as:
the imaginary construction of a radical operation which constitutes the symbolic field and all beings inscribed therein. This operation constitutes […] language as a separation from a presumed state of nature. (Kristeva, p. 198)
The fantasy is that somewhere or somewhen lies the blissful, lost home from which we have been so rudely separated and to which we long to return; but this home, the object of nostalgia, is difficult to describe (Boym, p. xiv).
To anchor the yearning, however, names may be provided to stand in for the elusive object of nostalgia. Sometimes we name this longed-for object “medieval”, that is to say the signifier is emptied of its historical content in order to provide a screen on which the fantasies of nostalgia can be displayed. Such signifiers (“childhood” and “the 1950’s” might be others) act as wildcards for fantasy; chameleon-like, they take on whatever characteristics we might attribute to the longed-for lost home. Why the signifier “medieval” should be privileged in this way is unclear but I can think of three possible reasons: firstly, that the negative or empty status of the medieval, as defined only by its relation to the ancient and modern worlds, lends itself to the production of fantasy; secondly that the Middle Ages’ mysterious alter, the “Dark Ages”, still responds to nostalgia’s craving for the secret, the unknowable, and its concomitant craving for the Gothic frisson of horror which the “dark” implies. Thirdly, consumers may recognize in the sentiments of courtly love avowed in medieval lyric and romance a nostalgic yearning similar to their own.
Nostalgic fantasies of non-separation, a harmonious time or place at peace and in tune with nature, abound in this New Age, not least in these two films, and music plays a significant role in the fostering of such fantasies. Claudia Gorbman observes that film music ‘lessens defenses against the fantasy structures to which [film] narrative provides access [increasing] the spectator’s susceptibility to suggestion’ (Gorbman, p. 5). From the perspective of the Lacanian lost object of desire, objet (petit) a, my essay explores the ways in which music permeates the film-goer’s defenses to suggest and sustain a lost-world fantasy in these films.
Fantasy and the objet a
For Jacques Lacan, whatever object we might pose for our desire can never be objet a, which inevitably remains lost and has always been lost. As he expressed it, “it is in its nature that the object as such is lost” (Lacan 1997, p. 52) since it is actually the cause of desire:
the substance of what is supposedly object-like […] is in fact that which constitutes a remainder in desire, namely, its cause, and sustains desire through its lack of satisfaction […] and even its impossibility. (Lacan 1999, p. 6)
Objet a is the motor which drives desire on, not what satisfies it. Desire is sustained, kept going, through its non-satisfaction.
For Lacan objet a is non-specular,[1] that is, it “cannot be grasped in a mirror” and “a beyond-of-the-signifier” (Lacan 1997, p. 54), impossible to represent or signify although we inevitably attempt to bring it into the fields of signification and representation. But if objet a cannot be represented or signified, how is desire to be supported? Only via fantasy, Lacan insisted (Lacan 1981, p. 185). Fantasy is precisely that attempt to represent objet a. Lacan used the matheme $<>a,[2] to designate fantasy; that is to say, fantasy intervenes between the split subject and the impossible objet a.[3] Thus “[p]hantasy is the support of desire” and what sustains the subject as desiring (Lacan 1981, p. 185). It is in the fantasy that our representations and significations are bound up. Medievalist fantasy film supports a fantasy for the film-goer in this psychoanalytic sense, that is it provides a means to sustain nostalgic desire through its representations of the lost “medieval” home.
Slavoj Zizek emphasises the narrative aspect of fantasy. He calls fantasy “the primordial form of narrative which serves to occult some original deadlock”:
[T]he lost quality only emerged at this very moment of its alleged loss. This coincidence of emergence and loss designates the fundamental paradox of the Lacanian object a, which emerges as being-lost. Narrativization occludes this paradox by describing the process in which the object is first given and then gets lost.[4]
Stuart Tannock provides a similar narrativisation in his definition of nostalgia:
In the rhetoric of nostalgia one inevitably finds three key ideas: first a prelapsarian world […]; second, that of a ‘lapse’ (a cut, a Catastrophe, a separation or sundering, the Fall); and third, that of the present, postlapsarian world (a world felt in some way to be lacking, deficient or oppressive). (Tannock, pp. 456-7)
I would add a fourth component, implicit in the third: a never-relinquished desire to return to the prelapsarian paradise where nothing lacks.
Fantasy’s narrative, according to Zizek, functions to temporalise the loss endemic to speaking beings so as to hide the “coincidence of [its] emergence and loss”. The Arthurian story, like Genesis, is exemplary, since it temporalises a primordial loss in a narrative of prelapsarian, lapse and postlapsarian. It also promises a return. But in these two films, in particular Excalibur, it seems to me that the fantasy does not entirely occlude the coincidence of emergence and loss.
Zizek, who explores the social and ideological dimensions of fantasy, notes also the prevalence of paranoia in common fantasies of the given and lost object; for instance, the necessary obverse to the “beatific” notion of the harmonious Nazi Volksgemeinschaft is the “paranoiac obsession with the Jewish plot”.[5] The fantasy seeks someone to hate with impunity, someone it is right to hate. Neither Excalibur nor Mists can be entirely reduced to a conspiracy theory, however, in which blameless innocents are deprived of the precious object by wicked conspirators, although each has its paranoiac tendencies. In Mists the masculine hierarchy of the Christian church is most singled out as an object of righteous hatred. In Excalibur it is those representatives of ungovernable womanhood, Guenevere and Morgana, who bear the heaviest load of blame. But in the end the Arthurian story, like Genesis, is so familiar to us that the end appears inevitable by whatever means it is produced. Time and narrative are subverted since the ending is known from the beginning. This tendency to subvert the film narrative I call mythic.
Something constant is at work in the Arthurian tale which undermines the narrative process. Agency is de-emphasized since myth subverts the idea of cause and effect. There is not so much temptation to say “if only”: if only Guenevere had never met Lancelot or if only Morgan had not nursed vengeance for the death of her father, any more than there is a temptation to say: if only Oedipus had not met his father at the crossroads and killed him. That would feel to us like beginning at the wrong end (the beginning, that is), as if there were any other possible ending. In the films – again more so in Excalibur – conspiracy paranoia is reduced by the impression of a tragic necessity endemic to humanity. In this respect the films follow the mythic Arthurian tradition in the sense I am using the term here, that is that they speak this tragic necessity, always true, and therefore beyond time and narrative.
Myth, like fantasy, allows a speaking, but it is of a different kind. In his seminar of 1960-61, Transference, Lacan maintains that what manifests in the real can only be spoken of as myth.[6] For Lacan, myth “doesn’t explain anything” (Lacan 1997, p. 143), unlike fantasy which seeks always to explain the catastrophe in either personal or ideological terms, that is, in narrative terms:
[The myth, for Lacan] concerns the individual and also the collectivity, but there is no […] opposition between them at the level involved. For it is a matter here of the subject as he suffers from the signifier.(Lacan 1997, p. 143)
At this level we are all necessarily in the same boat insofar as we are all speaking beings, suffering our subjection to the signifier.
This necessity of loss is harmful to desire, which relies on hope in the future. To the extent that necessity banishes hope, these two films could more properly be called myths than fantasies. But what is occluded in the films, I think, is the impossibility of a return to the lost home. Desire is sustained in both films by a hope of return to the beloved lost home, a hope which fends off knowledge of the impossible, and to the extent that hope survives the dictates of necessity the films can be called fantasies. One could say that they contain both aspects in uneasy cohabitation and in differing quantities.
Two Edens
Both films parse the fantasy of an Edenic time/place in animistic terms. In Excalibur it is the time “when the world was young and bird and beast and flower were one with man and death was but a dream”. This is the time of the dragon which “is everywhere [and] everything…Its scale is in the bark of trees, its roar is heard in the wind and its forked tongue strikes like lightning”. Through Merlin’s power this time is glimpsed in Arthur’s reign (“You will be the land and the land will be you” he instructs Arthur), but only momentarily. Merlin foresees its failure even as he labours at bringing it to birth. He tells Morgana (Excalibur’s version of Morgan le Fay) it is already passing even at the height of Arthur’s reign, driven out by Christianity, whose music swells triumphantly over their conversation to emphasize his point:
The days of our kind [the necromancers] are numbered. The one God comes to drive out the many gods, the spirits of wood and stream grow silent. It’s the way of things. It’s a time for men and their ways.
Merlin’s foresight is the perfect vehicle to convey the inevitability of loss. It is no accident that Arthur’s story, like Oedipus’, has a prophet on the scene. For the prophet the future co-exists with present and past, thus chronological time is collapsed and with it the fantasy narrative, so that the emergence and loss of the precious object can be perceived at once.[7] “Too late”, Merlin observes, as he watches Arthur’s burgeoning love for Guenevere. For Merlin, and for us, who have our hindsight to confirm his foresight, it has always been too late.
In Mists of Avalon the precious time is the time of the Goddess, still preserved in an Avalon under threat but protected by priestesses, headed up by Viviane, Lady of the Lake and high-priestess of Avalon and seconded by a benevolent but ineffectual Merlin. This Merlin is little more than a diplomatic mouthpiece for Viviane’s pronouncements. Neither he nor Viviane quite fulfil the function of fully-fledged seer, unlike Excalibur’s Merlin who is immortal (Haydock, p. 71) and sees as an immortal. He, like T. H. White’s Merlin, cannot help but see,[8] whereas the sight of the mortal Viviane is flawed and partial. Her passionate desire to save Avalon blinds her, for instance, to the character of Mordred whom she assists, ultimately, in his destruction of Camelot. She, Merlin and Morgaine are all too mortal. With typically human self-centredness they ask where they went wrong, like the eponymous protagonist of Steven Barron’s TV miniseries Merlin (USA 1998). They examine their consciences, at least as death approaches (something no immortal would be in a position to do), contemplating the possibility of other endings, if only things had been different. This failure to view prophetically gives Mists more of a tendency towards the narrativisation of fantasy than towards the temporal and causal collapse of myth.
Viviane instructs the young apprentice priestess, Morgaine, another version of Morgan le Fay:
The Goddess is everything in nature and everything in nature is sacred. Look [they look out over a field of grain], that is her face, listen [a bird calls], that is her voice. She is in everything that is beautiful and everything that is harrowing as well.
In each case the primeval being, dragon or Goddess, is everything, although, again in each case, there is an immediate slippage from “is everything” to “is in everything”. The first suggests more powerfully an undifferentiated state before the separations inflicted by language, although the impression of un-differentiation is already weakened simply by the naming and thus the personification of “everything” as Goddess or dragon. In Mists differentiation is further implied in Viviane’s later words, as she stands before the altar of the Goddess with Morgaine: “The Goddess holds all things in balance, good and evil, death and rebirth, the predator and the prey”. Thus there is slippage from an unseparated, primordial state of nature to a beingdwelling within nature in the first case, or presiding over nature in the second. Fantasy must have its narrative and no narrative can be sustained by the primordial.
In both films Arthur and other youngsters are guided or manipulated by these magical elders into preserving the paradisal time/place. We, looking back, know that in all possible variants it will be lost, but always leaving behind it the hope of its return. At the end of Mists Morgaine recognizes the Goddess in the garb of the Christian virgin and prophesies, with a nod to the New Age, that “future generations may bring her back as we knew her in the glory of Avalon”. The New Age is quick to pick up the nod. The prophecy is fulfilled according to one neo-pagan who writes in a review of Mists on Filmtracks.com: “Thankfully the Goddess is coming back to us in our lifetime to restore love, respect, and common sense”.[9] In Excalibur, more traditionally, Arthur tells Perceval that “one day a king will come and the sword will rise again”. The ship with the four queens cues us that the king will always be Arthur, the once and future king who has never truly gone.
Music for myth, music for fantasy
In both films the music can be organized, with differences, according to various functions, two of which have a bearing on these questions of myth and fantasy, necessity and desire. In the first, mainly instrumental music on a grand scale accompanies and establishes mythopoeic moments. In the second, music creates a miasma around magical acts, places or events. Here the voice predominates – a feminine voice which calls to the listener.
In Excalibur Wagnerian music bestows a momentousness on the events it accompanies, placing them beyond the personal or ideological into a mythic dimension. We are alerted to the unfolding of an inevitable tragedy. The end is already present in the prologue, signified by the doom-laden tones of Siegfried’s funeral march from Götterdämmerung (1871). Here the full weight of Wagner’s extensive orchestral resources and the signifying power of the major-minor harmonic system are employed to provide a saturation of meaning and significance. The theme begins with kettle drums, building to a climax of fateful significance via a series of semi-tonal stabs,[10] emphasizing each line of the synopsis, finally modulating to a menacing, brass-heavy C minor chord coinciding with the appearance of the title in dazzling, sword-like letters. This leitmotif is repeated at crucial mythopoeic points such as when the sword changes hands.
The prelude to Tristan and Isolde is fittingly set for the unfolding of Lancelot and Guenevere’s tragic love; Arthur rides into battle to the tune of the much-exploited “O Fortuna” from Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana (1937).[11] Orff’s relentless rhythms suggest vast, surging tides of human destiny, an impression supported by the 13th-century lyrics: “Fate…is against me, driven on and weighted down, always enslaved…Fate strikes down the strong man, everyone weep with me”.[12]
The musical sources are not medieval although they cite the medieval, through more modern eyes, in an inflated, ennobled form. It is as if Arthur and co. gain mythic density via these citations which feed the idea of the “medieval” as mythic time. Music drawn from medieval sources is not employed; medieval composers could not be expected to have any appreciation of the “medieval” as it might be coded for us. Like the characters in Henry James’ short story, medieval music might be “The real thing” but the real thing will not do. The artist prefers, as James’ narrator comments, “the represented subject over the real one: the defect of the real one [is] so apt to be a lack of representation” (James online). Medieval music does not have the distance required to represent the medieval since representation of any kind presumes non-identity with the original. Nothing can represent itself. The representation each film provides with its music is, instead, the means it employs to sustain a particular idea of the medieval which suits its creative and ideological ends.
In Mists Mordred confronts Arthur in the last battle. This music, composed by Lee Holdridge, echoes Wagner. There is the same scoring for brass and percussion, the same doom-laden chords, but functioning rather differently. When heard with the image, this music is less momentous, less mythopoeic, perhaps partly because the exploits of men, so central in Excalibur, are reduced to a subplot in Mists’ revisioning of the legend. I think too that, as music newly-composed for the film and harnessed to the narrative, Holdridge’s battle theme has no citation value. Citation value accrues over time, like interest, each citation creating added value and, in this case, a further guarantee of mythic status. Holdridge’s music, with so little time to impress itself on the listener, is much harder to hear, much more easily over-ridden by visual image and narrative momentum. Even for viewers unfamiliar with Wagner, his music overturns the usual balance whereby music is the self-effacing handmaiden of the classical cinematic narrative.[13] It is very hard not to hear Wagner. His music, evidently not custom-made for the film, floats free from the image, bestowing its already-established medieval/mythic character on the scene. Excalibur’s oft-repeated leitmotifs from Wagner and Orff inform us that there is more here than can be garnered from the image or the narrative.
I call the second function of music “the calling voice”. Usually it is a wordless call, gesturing, I suggest, towards a time before words had meaning: mother’s voice in fact. It is acousmatic, a “sonorous womb”, surrounding us with no localized source (Rosolato, p. 81). In Excalibur it is a high, icy, coloratura voice which conveys, say the liner notes, “the powers of darkness”. This cue is often used when the dragon’s power is invoked, as in the scene where Uther rides the dragon’s breath to his encounter with Igraine and the conception of Arthur. The dragon is the source of all power since it is itself “everything”, but you wake it at your peril. Merlin warns Morgana, who craves the knowledge of necromancy: “[S]uch knowledge would burn you”.
This cold voice, calling amidst shrill, discordant instruments, aurally represents the peril of such knowledge as the extreme cold that burns, visually represented in the dragon’s cave of ice and fire. Both Morgana and Guenevere, like Eve, stretch forth their hand for forbidden fruit, Guenevere for her unlawful passion for Lancelot, Morgana for the powers of necromancy which she will use to avenge her father’s death. Merlin accuses Morgana: “Perhaps you lust for what you cannot have”. This is fantasy as ?i?ek reads it, revealed by its paranoid fear. It is a masculine fantasy, of women who, in their ungovernable lust, transgress the law, bringing the world tumbling down around them.[14] That siren cry spells doom to the hard-won achievements of men, drawing chaos in its wake.
In Mists the voice is very different, two voices actually, both belonging to singers of “Celtic” music with a reputation beyond the film. One is Loreena McKennitt, whose song “The Mystic’s Dream” from a 1994 album, The Mask and the Mirror, is quoted throughout the film, for instance during the scene of Morgaine’s apprenticeship as a priestess on Avalon. Usually, what we hear in the film is the wordless prelude. The other singer is Aeone, whose voice, also wordless, accompanies Morgaine’s first journey to Avalon with Viviane. Aeone, together with Holdridge, also wrote a song inspired by the film, “I Will Remember You Still”, which is played on the soundtrack CD. McKennitt’s song, like Excalibur’s quotations from Wagner and Orff, has citation value from its previous incarnations, but the citations valorise not myth but fantasy. The “medieval” is exploited differently here, not as confirming a collective destiny but as musically representing an ancient, lost home. It stresses the archaic and exotic of fantasy rather than the inevitable and eternal of myth.
In Mists also, medieval music is passed over as not “medieval” enough. This time it is passed over in favour of orientalising and medievalising musical gestures. McKennitt’s first wordless, a-rhythmic cry is in the double harmonic scale of D, sometimes called Byzantine: semitone – augmented second – semitone – tone – semitone – augmented second – semitone, that is, in C: C, D flat, E, F, G, A flat, B. “Double harmonic” refers to the two augmented seconds, between the second and third and between the sixth and seventh pitches. The augmented second sounds foreign and exotic to Western ears. The melody shifts, in a second male-voiced, chant-like prelude which McKennitt takes up, to a natural minor, also strange to our ears and associated with medieval music. The minor seventh is particularly stressed because, like the augmented second, it is unfamiliar.
To a modern Western ear, trained on the more recently-developed major-minor harmonic system, the raised seventh is heard as leading up to the tonic. For instance the online Brittanica observes: “This note has a strong leading tendency toward the tonic, or keynote […] because it is only a half step away from the tonic, and is thus called the leading note”.[15] The leading note “wants” to go to the tonic. A minor seventh, not reaching for the tonic sounds, to modern ears, strange, almost wilful (why does it resist the pull of the tonic?) and, in particular, ancient. The first prelude stresses the “elsewhere” of exotic, the second the “before” of archaic, together a potent recipe for nostalgic longing. “The Mystic’s Dream”, like Aeone’s song, is brimming with lost-world longing and the half-promise of an eventual return; there is no sense of a necessary and final loss. Rather there is an ambiguous tristesse which keeps its options open with an endlessly repeated “maybe”, half suffering, half enjoying its yearning.
The lyrics of both songs re-enforce this effect. They have, to my ears, a vague, all-purpose quality. They appear to function as elements in a medieval/Celtic, pro-forma fantasy which can then be fleshed out by the listener according to inclination. They contain numerous key words and phrases: “voiceless song in an ageless night”, “birds in flight are calling there”, “even the distance feels so near”,[16] “it’s there my heart is longing”, “drifting years”, “draws me far away”, “your lamps will call me home”. “distant shore”, “carry my voice on the wind”, “waters that keep us apart”.[17] In fact almost every word carries a note of yearning for a lost, faraway home which calls unceasingly in a “voiceless song”. The words support a fantasy of the wordless, and, beyond the wordless, a voiceless song, something which cannot be signified but which language strives to indicate by oxymoron – objet a.
McKennitt’s song has had numerous incarnations; it can be heard on Youtube, accompanying mystical and warrior scenes,[18] and, again on Youtube, in association with a World of Warcraft character called Arthas.[19] Aeone’s song, “I Will Remember You Still” has also had a life on Youtube, accompanying, amongst other images, an antlered man enthroned, cowled figures, prehistoric huts and their ruins, excerpts from the film, a Celtic cross, maidens or priestesses in a circle.[20] The images associated with these songs appear to function, like the lyrics, as cues for a fantasy which approaches what cannot be represented – again objet a, the always already lost object.
Unlike the danger signals issued by the piercing voice of Excalibur, the calling voice of Mists appears in its warmest, most benign aspect. In both cases, I suggest, the voice calls us to an impossible, pre-Oedipal home before language, but differently inflected and with very different effects. Excalibur speaks in the “name of the father”, that is, in Lacan’s terms, that which “support[s]…the symbolic function [language], which, from the dawn of history, has identified his person with the figure of the law” (Lacan 1989, p. 67). The name of the father (“nom-du-père”) is, in French, homophonous with the “no” of the father. From the point of view of Excalibur’s masculine fantasy of uncontrollable feminine desire this call amounts to an invitation to incest, a refusal of the father’s “no”. The voice here represents the anxiety this tempting call evokes and a corresponding hostility towards women. The incestuous home to which this voice calls is one of horror, not a haven but a house of shame, or perhaps both, since it evokes both desire and horror.[21] The horror is what implicates the desire.
In Mists, the call is, in the main, addressed to women. It is the same call, offering a return to a time before the cut of the father’s “no”, but with a different valency. Women have not fared so well under the father’s law and the promise held out of a return to a time before its advent is enticing. The film and its music encourage us to follow Morgaine’s example in her adoption of the Goddess as mother: “Gradually I came to look upon the Goddess as my own Mother and the Mother of the earth itself”. This call bids the listener to return to mother’s arms and her loving voice, refusing separation. Hélène Cixous described such a voice:
Voice [which] sings from a time before law, before the Symbolic took one’s breath away and reappropriated it into language under its authority of separation. (Cixous, p. 93)
It is a seductive call, partly because it offers solace in a harsh world, partly because it supports a recuperative program, set out in the prologue. The film begins with Morgaine’s announcement in voice-over: “Most of what you think you know [of the legend] is nothing but lies”. We are close to a conspiracy theory here. There has been a cover-up! Christian masculinity has distorted the story, defaming the old religion and demonizing women, but the truth will now be told: there was once an ancient, feminine way, more just, more harmonious than patriarchy. It was destroyed but it can return.[22] Allied to this recuperative value is the identificatory power that Goddess-worship offers women, the heady sense of a specifically feminine sacred power and wisdom.
In fact what the film poses is a law before the law, a pre-symbolic symbolic. I think this is what happens when we fantasize backwards, since we can only fantasize from within the law, which is the law of language. This is perhaps what saves this fantasy from the fear represented by the chilling voice in Excalibur, which I read as fear of an uncastrated feminine chaos, feminine desires running wild without a good father/king at the helm and a good phallic sword in his hand. It is, at the same time, the fear of a primordial chaos without the differentiations the law of language imposes. But for believers in the Goddess, like the one quoted above, She will “restore love, respect, and common sense”, good sound law laid down by a sensible mother. “The Goddess holds all things in balance”, as Viviane proclaims, distancing the mother Goddess from the terror of chaos.
Mists tries to have it both ways: it poses a tamed archaic Goddess-mother, one who is on the one hand “everything” in an unseparated state, what Kristeva called the “full, total englobing mother […] with no […] separation […] no castration” (Kristeva, p. 209), and, on the other, a good, commonsensical lawmaker. No such claims are made for Excalibur’s dragon, which is presented as a wild force, utterly lawless and apparently mindless; to be treated with the utmost caution. Mists needs its law because without the notion of a pre-patriarchal, just and harmonious law, the film could not achieve its ideological ends. The words and acts of men could not be correctly judged and the record set straight. But it must be mother’s law, not father’s. Merlin is presented as little more than Viviane’s mouthpiece; Arthur is a puppet king who, when he disobeys, is ousted.
It is this second function, the call, which fosters a fantasy viewed in the terms I began with: that it sustains the desire – or a fear which betrays the desire – of a return to a lost, maternal paradise; that it occludes the coincidence of the object’s emergence and loss by providing a narrative account of the loss; lastly, that it operates ideologically, by which, in this context, I mean paranoiacally, providing a narrative of villains and victims to account for the disaster.
Both films sustain the fantasy of a maternal voice calling us home but Mists, due, I think, to a logical and ideological impasse, tends less towards the sense of necessity which makes a myth. Mists attempts to sit on both sides of the symbolic divide because to acknowledge the necessity of the paradoxical loss which language entails might involve acknowledging the name-of-the-father, if, as Lacan suggests, this name “support[s]…the symbolic function [and is associated with] the figure of the law” (Lacan 1989, p. 67). It is an association of the symbolic function, not with the paternal figure of the law, but with the actual, oppressive laws of the fathers. In the film these laws are expressed in Arthur’s betrayal of Avalon and the Mother Goddess and the subsequent Christian destruction of the old matriarchal religion. This is what creates the impasse for Mists – a confusion of the symbolic name-of-the-father with the politics of patriarchy. Excalibur also confuses the two but because of its different positioning there is no impasse. To put it another way, Excalibur’s mythopoeic strategies present no obstacle to its fantasy; the film shelters from the fear of mother’s unsettling desire behind the barrier of father’s symbolic law.
In the films myth and fantasy evoke different temporalities. Myth evokes the eternity of the immortals because it invokes what is always true for humanity (but always an eternity viewed from the side of the symbolic). Fantasy evokes the primordial because it gestures to a time before a cut or Fall – before the calamity. The medieval is invoked to stand in for each of these temporalities, the eternal and the primordial, and the film music functions to differentiate the two. One could say that because of their different ideological agendas (their fantasies) –Excalibur on the side of the function of a symbolic associated with the father, Mists on the side of a maternal, pre-symbolic symbolic – each favours the music which supports these positions, Excalibur the mythopoeic, Mists the calling voice.
Works Cited
Sylvia Boym: “Nostalgics from all over the world would find it difficult to say what exactly they yearn for”, The Future of Nostalgia (London: Basic Books, 2001), xiv.
Hélène Cixous, “Sorties” in Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing, intro. Sandra M. Gilbert (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986).
Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (London: BFI, 1987).
Henry James, “The Real Thing”, http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/2098/ (accessed 27.08.08).
Julia Kristeva, The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986).
Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Book XI of The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1981), p. 185.
Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection. Trans, Alan Sheridan. (London: Routledge,1989)
Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-1960, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. and notes Dennis Porter. Book VII of The Seminar of Jacques Lacan (New York: Norton, 1997).
Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge: Encore, 1972-1973, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. and notes Bruce Fink. Book XX of The Seminar of Jacques Lacan (New York: Norton, 1999).
Guy Rosolato, “La voix: entre corps et langage”, Revue Française de Psychanalyse 37, no. 1 (1974).
Stewart Tannock, “Nostalgia critique”, Cultural Studies 9, no. 3 (1995).
Slavoj ?i?ek, “The Seven Veils of Fantasy” in Key Concepts of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Ed. Dany Nobus (London: Rebus, 1998), p. 199.
Endnotes
[1] Such objects “have no specular image, or, in other words, alterity. [They] cannot be grasped in a mirror” Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious”, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 315-6.
[2] e.g. in Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject”, Écrits: A Selection, p. 315.
[3] In Michael Plastow’s words, “the fantasm appears in the place of an object that is lacking”. “From Family Myth to Individual Fantasm”, Papers of the Freudian school of Melbourne, ed. David Pereira, 21 (2000): p. 35.
[4] Slavoj ?i?ek, “The Seven Veils of Fantasy” in Key Concepts of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Ed. Dany Nobus (London: Rebus, 1998), p. 199.
[5] Zizek, p. 192.
[6] Transference, lesson of 7.12.60: 2 (unpublished). Cf. also: “Myth is what provides a discursive form for something that cannot be transmitted through the definition of truth […] It can only express truth – and this, in a mythic mode”. Lacan, “The Neurotic’s Individual Myth”. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 48 (1979): p. 143. Perhaps Lacan’s dictum, that the truth can only be half said, is another way of saying this.
[7] For Nickolas Haydock “[t]he dragon is time itself”, but it is the prophet’s eternal time in which “[p]ast, present, and future are screened within the crystal cave [of the dragon] like so many reflections in a house of mirrors”, Movie Medievalism: The Imaginary Middle Ages, (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2008), p. 71.
[8] For example, T. H. White, The Once and Future King (New York: Ace Books, 1996), p. 29.
[9] http://www.filmtracks.com/comments/titles/mists_avalon/index.cgi?read=162&expand=1#162 (accessed 16.09.08).
[10] The semitone is the smallest interval generally found in the western major-minor harmonic system.
[11] Wikipedia offers these names, among others, of “bands and artists that have covered/sampled the work”: Apotheosis, Botch, Enigma, Era, Highland, KMFDM, Overkill (band), The Disco Biscuits, Therion, Trans-Siberian Orchestra, Vital Remains” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O_Fortuna (accessed 19.09.08).
[12] Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O_Fortuna, (accessed 19.09.08).
[13] But cf. Norris J. Lacy who disagrees: “[W]hether the use of Wagner […] simply sets a mood or instead establishes a complex overlay of themes prefiguring […] passion or death depends quite simply on the viewer’s recognition of the music”, Lacy, “Mythopoeia in Excalibur”, in Cinema Arthuriana: Twenty Essays, ed. Kevin J. Harty , rev. ed. (Jefferson, North Carolina; London: McFarland, 2002), 41. It is not so simple. Music composed specifically for film is structurally quite different from music composed in other contexts, produced with, as Claudia Gorbman suggests, “a minimum adherence to musical syntax [and] a maximum flexibility of resources, so that the score can accommodate itself to narrative events”. Gorbman, Unheard Melodies(Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1987), 14. Ears unfamiliar with Wagner will still recognize the difference between a musical quotation and music composed for the film.
[14] Cf. Jacqueline de Weever’s account: “Boorman […] joins the tradition of antifeminist interpretations of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, that woman’s power is to be feared because it produces only evil”. Weever, “Morgan and the Problem of Incest”, Cinema Arthuriana: Twenty Essays, ed. Kevin J. Harty, rev. ed. (Jefferson, North Carolina; London: McFarland, 2002), p. 59.
[15] http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/333693/leading-note (accessed 21-04-09)
[16] Lyrics for “The Mystic’s Dream”: http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/The-Mystic%27s-Dream-lyrics-Loreena-McKennitt/BE096DB0B45BE90148256BDC000FCF94 (accessed 28.09.08)
[17] Lyrics for “I Will Remember You Still”:http://www.lyricsmode.com/lyrics/a/aeone/i_will_remember_you_still.html (accessed 28.09.08) Cf. another McKennitt song, “Gates of Istanbul” from her CD: An Ancient Muse (2006): “Hear there, in that dark blue night/the music calling us home”.
[18] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3h0o_irhzxs&feature=related (accessed 28.09.08).
[19] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2R69nV4HOaE&feature=related (accessed 28.09.08)
[20] Website no longer accessible.
[21] Cf. Michel Chion’s idea of the ‘umbilical web’ which ‘the voice of the Mother weav[es] around the child’, an image he acknowledges is horrifying in its ‘evocation of spiders’ The Voice in Cinema, ed. and trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), p. 61.
[22] There is a lively and acrimonious debate on the internet between Christians and neo-pagans about the film, its merits and its historical veracity. See, for instance, filmtracks.com:http://www.filmtracks.com/comments/titles/mists_avalon/index.cgi?read=162&expand=1#162 (accessed 28.09.08).
Created on: Sunday, 20 December 2009