Freud in Pop

Psychoanalysis is so dead. The academic community collectively scoffs at Freud’s outdated ideas, and, although they are still largely indebted to him since they use him in some bases of theories, we are so over psychoanalysis. Except those of us in literature. We seem to not be able to get past Freud and the triangle he places us in (or that our subconscious places us in?). We, the children of our mother, literary analysis, are always trying to reach an, some, any, understanding of literature, maybe better said, “existence” (whatever vagaries are implied in that) and therefore we must always pass through the law of Freud.

Anyways, it is hard to get away from this. Even if one looks at pop culture, Freud creeps in. He says that we must always live in the symbolic, and while it is not the most comfortable at times, it is the “healthiest”. Therefore, this escape from the symbolic that we are always pursuing can have dangerous consequences. Especially for women. We see women all over trying to get into the “real”, but then neatly inserted back into their role as objects in the symbolic. It’s like we subconsciously can’t get past the idea of a woman who doesn’t live under the law, under the “name of the father” (read: subjected to man’s authority), and we can’t live with the un-comfortableness of a woman living outside the symbolic.

Kate Perry is a great example of this. In two of her most popular songs she is very much pushing traditional ideas of femininity, whose “pushing-the-envelope-ness” can be attested, seeing the controversies these songs caused. She kissed a girl and she liked it. And just as she doesn’t really care if her boyfriend minds it or not, she refuses to be strung along by her hot’n’cold boyfriend. Woman power.

But, really?

So maybe it is her “real” that she wants to kiss a girl. She does it in her video for her song “I kissed a girl.” Even in an age where Bjork, Tatu, Madonna and Britney have all exploited such a move to generate huge publicity, is still a strong gesture. But at the end of the video, she suddenly wakes up, in her bed, where her boyfriend sleeps soundly as she perniciously fantasizes. In “Hot’n’cold,” bride-zillas with smeared make-up terrorize the non-committal boyfriend with bats, the image of his deserted bride haunts him as he looks for escape in raging dance clubs, she finds him in alleys with her posse, even chases after him on a bike. It would seem that finally a woman was the law that this loser could not escape, and that women might achieve the law of the “mother” through which all symbolic experience must be past. In fact, she tries to attribute feminine characteristics to the supposed purveyor of the law, to discredit his masculinity, saying that “you change your mind like a girl changes clothes.” The song becomes an attack on the stability of the “father’s authority.” Alas, with the saying of his name, non-committal man is drawn back to the pretty reality of the church in which his wedding is taking place, where the delightful scene rejoices when this women with smeared makeup is finally subjected to the slavery of marriage, subjected to living her existence under the “name of the father.”

In an almost exact duplicate, Shakira lets all her bottled up female sensuality lose in “Loba”, becoming a sexual prowler who needs to be caged up, all the while encouraging women to find the “she-wolf” in herself to then “let her out and breath.” One can understand the clamor among women for sexual equality, and one would hope that maybe in the 21^st century we would have overcome medieval notions of the female lack of libido and Victorian notions of the need to repress it. Unfortunately, even in popular music videos, women who try to escape these notions are always put back into their place. Ironically, to transform into this she-wolf, Shakira has to transverse her own closet, full of the signifiers that we ascribe to traditional femininity and its link to modern consumerism: clothes. The she-wolf is in the closet, behind all those layers of ascribed femininity. Let her loose. Dance on some roof in San Francisco (coincidence that this video is filmed in the American city usually associated with sexual liberty?). But only liberate yourself to the point that, at the end of the movie, you can still slip quietly back into the bed of your sleeping masculine counterpart (lest I employ the terms boyfriend, husband, partner or fuck-buddy wrongly) without disturbing him. In other words, don’t get too far from the symbolic.

Even Lady Gaga, an artist whose supposed sexual liberation is one of her defining characteristics, falls into the trap. In the video for her song “Paparazzi,” Lady Gaga exacts revenge on the boyfriend that pushed her from the balcony, leaving her incapacitated and with the only motivation to go on her future being her revenge. As she calls the police to tell them that she killed her boyfriend, one thinks that finally we will witness the break, and the anchors of Freudianism will fall off, allowing women to finally soar to her rightful place outside the law of the father. “Lady Gaga is Back” proclaims the newspapers in her video, and after overcoming the man, and living outside the symbolic, she is at her epitome, the climax of her career.

But no. She is neatly placed back in her role when she is caught by the police and rightfully punished with a humiliating mug-shot worse than any that her feared paparazzi enemies might have ever captured of her. In fact, her popularity stems from the fact that she is caught and “We love her again” title lines show in newspapers while she is being escorted by policemen back to reality from her frolic into the “real”. Back to the symbolic, out of the real. Coming out from under the symbolic seems impossible, even more so for these women, since the “symbolic” seems to be gendered male.

The moral of the story would seem to be that women should stop trying to escape from their prescribed roles in the symbolic. You are in fact just objects and you always will be.

But then again, Freud is died and we are so over psychoanalysis. Let’s see some women throw him off and let him rest in peace, showing that you can come from out beneath the law of the father.