유령의 시선: 오슨 웰즈의 〈시민 케인〉에 나타난 라캉의 응시와 ‘영화-눈’

Ghostly Vision: The Lacanian Gaze and the “Kino-Eye” in Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane

The traditional psychoanalytic film theory, which was the dominant discourse of cinema criticism in the 1970s and ’80s, has contributed to illuminating the ideological construction of the cinematic subject by utilizing several key concepts such as apparatus, identification, and suture. It has, however, overlooked the rich and profound cinematic potentialities that the Lacanian concept of the gaze originally contains. The Lacanian gaze opens up the heterogeneous space of desire and the real beyond the screen, and thereby creates a critical distance from the imaginary identification. Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941), I argue, visualizes the split of the eye and the gaze in the scopic field by embodying what Slavoj Žižek calls the “kino-eye” in Kane’s incorporeal gaze of desire. As the diegetic narrators’ vision represents the imaginary eyes of subjectivity and physicality, Kane’s ghostly vision epitomizes the subjective but subjectless gaze of the surplus real. The Lacanian gaze permeates Citizen Kane throughout, revealing itself whenever it encounters the stains of the most precious object, “rosebud.” Despite David Bordwell and Noel Carroll’s “official” announcement of its demise, Lacanian film theory perseveres like Kane’s ghost and gazes at the cinematic real beyond the subjective vision of pluralistic empiricism.