폭력의 근원

The Source of Violence: The Lacanian Gaze and the Real in Memories of Murder

Joonho Bong's Memories of Murder (2003) contains some opaque, apparently meaningless, stains in the peripheral margins of the screen. They remain invisible and insignificant since they elude our visual representation. These stains, however, both conceals and reveals the Lacanian gaze that invites the spectators to look behind the image. As long as trapped in the imaginary identification with a character, viewers cannot come across the gaze of the real. The gaze, once encountered, unveils the dark hollow tunnel, or the female genitalia, as the lack that evokes the castration anxiety on the part of the male subject. The film, then, points to perversion, which disavows the lack of the real and replaces it with a fetish, as the ultimate source of violence. Lacan's psychoanalytic theory, especially the concept of the gaze, turns out to be crucial to illuminating the film's complex portrayal of violence. This paper briefly examines the theory of the Lacanian gaze along with its psychoanalytic meanings and cinematic connotations, and then elucidates the textual signification of the film, focusing mainly on its stains. Joonho Bong's Memories of Murder, I argue, inscribes the traces of the gaze through the ocular stains, and, in so doing, not only displays the prevalence of violence in our daily life, but more importantly discloses the lack of the real as the cause of male anxiety and its disavowal as the source of the evil.