Erika in Michael Haneke’s 2001 film La Pianiste is a piano teacher at a music academy, playing at concerts from time to time but mostly to her mother’s satisfaction. She seems to embody a complete Freudian subject who can be summarized with hysteria and perversion, having penis-envy. With her father...
Erika in Michael Haneke’s 2001 film La Pianiste is a piano teacher at a music academy, playing at concerts from time to time but mostly to her mother’s satisfaction. She seems to embody a complete Freudian subject who can be summarized with hysteria and perversion, having penis-envy. With her father being absent, she has been forced to replace the father’s place for her sacrificing but intrusive mother. As a way to keep her role in the reality, Erika tends to fantasize sexual pleasures by simulating ecstatic experiences through various forms of evacuation, e.g. urinating and bleeding. Among such pastime activities of her, this paper focuses on her frequent visits to porno-shop, as implicating a hidden obsession with sado-masochist fantasy and assimilation to male sexuality. In this essay, I contend that the pornography exemplifies the identity confinement Erika faces, proving the fact that the system of pleasure representation does not have a room for female variants of sexual desire. As demonstrated in pornographic film, pornography does not allow its spectator to actually fantasize the pleasurable desire (not to mention that the desire represented in pornography is first and foremost masculine). By exposing the texture of bare copulations, pornographic images close any possibility of the spectator’s active participation of fantasizing, and consequently, obstruct him or her from moving to implementation of the fantasy. Therefore, Erika’s fantasy, presented both in her appreciation of pornography and in the masochistic letter addressed to Walter (a young admirer of her music and dominance), fails to explain her own autonomous desire, but is doomed to reveal the emptiness in her simulated pleasure. In other words, the “abnormal” expressions of her sexual desire (either the “study” of pornography or her masochistic letter) are nothing but the reconstitution of her fantasy of (or for) pleasure at various levels within her irreconcilable reality. The film depicts the process in which Erika tries to assimilate herself to the male desire and fantasy, and finally she realizes the pleasure she simulates cannot but become appropriated by the other (i.e. by the male subject) at the expense of the pain on her side. In conclusion, sexual fantasy, in Erika’s case, is only a theory which never communicates with its praxis. Whether it is hard-core pornography or eroticism, the practice of love must be a non-pleasurable shackle for a subject who cannot identify her desire within the male-centered system of representation.
Erika in Michael Haneke’s 2001 film La Pianiste is a piano teacher at a music academy, playing at concerts from time to time but mostly to her mother’s satisfaction. She seems to embody a complete Freudian subject who can be summarized with hysteria and perversion, having penis-envy. With her father being absent, she has been forced to replace the father’s place for her sacrificing but intrusive mother. As a way to keep her role in the reality, Erika tends to fantasize sexual pleasures by simulating ecstatic experiences through various forms of evacuation, e.g. urinating and bleeding. Among such pastime activities of her, this paper focuses on her frequent visits to porno-shop, as implicating a hidden obsession with sado-masochist fantasy and assimilation to male sexuality. In this essay, I contend that the pornography exemplifies the identity confinement Erika faces, proving the fact that the system of pleasure representation does not have a room for female variants of sexual desire. As demonstrated in pornographic film, pornography does not allow its spectator to actually fantasize the pleasurable desire (not to mention that the desire represented in pornography is first and foremost masculine). By exposing the texture of bare copulations, pornographic images close any possibility of the spectator’s active participation of fantasizing, and consequently, obstruct him or her from moving to implementation of the fantasy. Therefore, Erika’s fantasy, presented both in her appreciation of pornography and in the masochistic letter addressed to Walter (a young admirer of her music and dominance), fails to explain her own autonomous desire, but is doomed to reveal the emptiness in her simulated pleasure. In other words, the “abnormal” expressions of her sexual desire (either the “study” of pornography or her masochistic letter) are nothing but the reconstitution of her fantasy of (or for) pleasure at various levels within her irreconcilable reality. The film depicts the process in which Erika tries to assimilate herself to the male desire and fantasy, and finally she realizes the pleasure she simulates cannot but become appropriated by the other (i.e. by the male subject) at the expense of the pain on her side. In conclusion, sexual fantasy, in Erika’s case, is only a theory which never communicates with its praxis. Whether it is hard-core pornography or eroticism, the practice of love must be a non-pleasurable shackle for a subject who cannot identify her desire within the male-centered system of representation.
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