Over the past 3 months, I have published film essays with a particular focus on the Primal Scene. I began with the recent film, The Lives of Others (February), using Arlow’s paper, “The Revenge Motive in the Primal Scene” as my primary text. In the following months, in commentaries on LA Confidental (March) and the two films, The Crying Game and Mona Lisa (April), I have continued to focus on a sense of exclusion and a wish for revenge as an important dynamic in understanding the primal scene as it is represented in those films. This examination of Bertolucci’s The Conformist continues those themes. In doing so, I have ignored other important themes in this complex work in order to focus on a peculiar aspect of the film as I see it.
The Conformist was the first film that I ever “analyzed”, and doing that got me interested in thinking and writing about unconscious fantasy in film. I would like to point the reader to two extraordinary (to me) features of this film: 1. An unprecedented concentration of primal scene imagery; and, 2. A configuration of imagery that allows us to “reconstruct” a very specific, detailed primal scene fantasy. I have written about this in a much more condensed version in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis (1997: vol. 78:1031-1033). This expanded version was published in Double Feature: Discovering our Hidden Fantasies in Film (Herbert H. Stein, M.D.; 2002, Ereads).
