Beyond the Beyond: CGI and the Anxiety of Overperfection

Abstract

The goal of this essay is modest: to differentiate traditional analog filmmaking from new modalities of digital cinema in light of the psychoanalytic conceptions of desire and anxiety. Through a series of three examples, each of which bears the structure of a mirror, I seek to complicate existing theories of digital representation by foregrounding the notion—developed by Slavoj Žižek in Looking Awry and other early works—that the human subject is lured most profoundly when a representation admits some measure of real truth. Recent advances in digital image manipulation such as computer-generated imagery (CGI) and motion capture have engendered filmmakers’ pursuit of a pixel-polished hyperrealism. However, this approach, premised as it is on the attainability of a satisfying fullness, fails to incorporate the gaps, stains, and ruptures upon which traditional analog special effects flourished over much of the twentieth century. In a pointedly Žižekian sense, CGI fails to fail, and in doing so omits a crucial component of the subjective lure: the admission by the deceiver that a deception is in the offing. In other words, what Žižek calls the “double deception” of the Symbolic order is being digitally eradicated in favor of an Imaginary-order “single” deception.²

Keywords

These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

This essay was inspired by a lunch conversation with Todd McGowan and Louis-Paul Willis during the 2012 Žižek Studies Conference in Brockport, New York.