The scene which I’d most like to discuss from Y tu mamá también runs roughly from 1:19:08 to 1:20:04. In this scene Chuy, Tenoch, and Julio play soccer on the beach. The sequence begins with Chuy, back to the camera, in the foreground as Julio and Tenoch wrestle for the ball in the waves. Although Chuy is stationary and not yet involved in the action of the game, he is in focus. Chuy provides commentary as the boys play but, because his back is to the camera, we are not able to directly connect his speech to the movements of his mouth. We then move to a wide shot that shows Chuy and the boys against the beach backdrop as Chuy yells, urging his opponents to shoot the ball. The next shot—a full shot—shows Julio and Tenoch setting up to shoot the ball. A single shot shows Chuy preparing for his save, jumping to catch the ball, and tumbling to the ground. Chuy celebrates, proclaiming himself/Campos (the soccer player who he is “playing”) a “national hero” as he kneels on the sand, ball in hand. Julio and Tenoch laugh and Chuy looks to them asking, “What? Don’t you like Campos?”

This scene stuck out to me for a number of reasons. In her article “Provincia in Recent Mexican Cinema, 1989-2004”, Emily Hind asserts the “usefulness of the provincia to stage national metaphors” (30). One of the ways in which this operates is to force proximity between otherwise disparate groups. In several of the frames from this scene, middle-class Julio, rich Tenoch, and poor fisherman Chuy appear all together, creating a sort of national microcosm. The feeling of national metaphor is strengthened by Chuy’s soccer commentary which imagines himself and the boys as Mexican national soccer players. I think that sports feature heavily in national imagination and that this moment serves to emphasize that. However, it also suggests that proximity isn’t enough to unite the three men from different backgrounds, something more must act on them in order for them to stand in for the nation. This seemed to me like an interesting extension of Anderson’s statement that the nation is “imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion” (7). This scene suggests that even in the unlikely instances where we meet our fellow country-men, there is still ideological work to be done in order to unite us with them. Y tu mamá también shows one of the ways in which this “communion” can occur.

I was also struck by the decision to open this scene with a shot of Chuy from behind. Because we are unable to see Chuy speaking, his voice is (at least momentarily) disembodied. This was interesting to me because of the role the omniscient narrator plays in Y tu mamá también. The narrator throughout the film provides and intertwines cultural and personal context for the images on screen—describing the political landscape as the characters move through the physical one. In the few seconds before we realize it is Chuy delivering the commentary, Chuy occupies the same aural position as this narrator. Hind understands the narrative voiceover in Y tu mamá también as one that “calls attention to misleading appearances” (39). This renders Chuy’s brief occupation of this space complex, especially when considering form and content together. Chuy’s commentary is decidedly invested in the imagination of nation (emphasized when he declares himself a “national hero” upon blocking the shot). While this does not stand in direct opposition to the role of the narrator, who often problematizes nation, it does have a very different feel. I think there is also a collapsing of appearances and reality at the moment in which Chuy challenges the boys’ laughter, asking them, “What? You don’t like Campos?” By inhabiting Campos without changing his appearance, Chuy draws further attention to the gap between things by deliberately collapsing it. This is very different from the work the narrator does throughout, which serves to highlight this gap by opening it wider.

I am curious about a number of other things—not all of them related to this specific scene.

I’m interested in how other people experienced the temporality of Y tu mamá también. There is an absence of flashbacks and a generally direct, linear chronology. However, the voiceover looks both forward and backward in time. Does this work to create a heightened awareness of the duality (perhaps multiplicity) of film chronology?

Some of the driving sequences were reminiscent of Godard’s Weekend—though with less honking, thank god—in that the passengers in both cars bear witness to a number of different violent scenes. How can we consider some of these moments together? Do they operate in the same way? Does the engagement/non-engagement of the passengers with the oftentimes violent scenery shape our reading?

Because the ocean was featured so heavily, I was also reminded of Atlantics. I am interested in the interplay between beaches and borders particularly in the context of Anderson’s Imagined Communities. Anderson states that the nation is limited, encompassed by “finite, if elastic, boundaries beyond which lie other nations” (7). It seems to me that the beach serves to represent both this finitude and elasticity. How can we consider this in the light of the overall “quest” in Y tu mamá también or with specific reference to this beach soccer scene?

I would like to focus primarily on Christian Metz’s “Identification, Mirror” from The Imaginary Signifier. My decision to address this piece is, in part, due to my partiality towards Metz’s assertion that psychoanalytic theory adds something unique and necessary to the field of film studies but I also felt that this article allowed the most expansive understanding of spectatorship and cinema.

Metz begins by delineating the unique conditions of perception afforded by cinema. He underscores that cinema is more perceptual than many other art forms as it engages both our visual and auditory senses. This sets it apart from architecture, for instance, which relies on the visual, and music which appeals to us through sound. Art forms such as theater and opera, which are similarly audiovisual, are distinct from film because their events occur in real time and space. The spectator shares the room with the performers. Film, on the other hand, creates a disjuncture between the time/space of the events it represents and the time/space of the spectator. All of the perceptions afforded by film—though at once more and less than the other arts—are thus “in a sense ‘false.’ Or rather, the activity of perception which it involves is real (the cinema is not a phantasy), but the perceived is not really the object, it is its shade, its phantom, its double, its replica in a new kind of mirror” (696). This, in Metz’s view, pushes film into the realm of the imaginary.

The remainder of Metz’s piece contends with the limitations and implications of the mirror that cinema provides. The primary difference that Metz asserts between film-as-mirror and the primordial mirror (in which the ego is formed) is that the one thing the screen is unable to reflect is the body of the spectator. It is only because the spectator has already progressed through the mirror stage that they are able to understand the film as mirror despite their absence from the projected image. “But, with what, then, does the spectator identify during the projection of the film?” asks Metz (696).

The answer to this question is split into two parts. The spectator identifies with himself and the spectator identifies with the camera. It is the latter that most interests me but (of course) the former warrants summary. The identification with self rests on the spectator’s position as an all-perceiving subject—“I know that I am perceiving something imaginary…and I know that it is I who am perceiving it” (697). It is in this all-powerful position the spectator necessarily identifies not only with himself but with the camera as well. The “look” of the camera becomes synonymous with that of the spectator. In this looking-perceiving-projecting, a series of duplications occur (the spectator duplicates the movement of the camera, the screen, already a duplicate of the film strip is again represented on the retina of the spectator etc). The mirror of cinema is then not simply a single representation but a “series of mirror-effects, organized in a chain” (699).

The most compelling passages of Metz’s piece, for me, has to do with those moments in which we are forcibly reminded of our identification with the camera. Metz locates these in those shots that do not correspond directly with our expectations of looking, in the uncommon angle or strange framing that jolts the spectator from their position of all-knowing. Metz does not understand these moments as being any more or less representative of the “author’s viewpoint” but instead asserts that they can be productively explored as disruptions in the ease of identification.

I found Lost in Translation to be largely free of jarring shots (other than the fact that they are oftentimes only occupied by a single character). This is not to say, however, that the film is free of disruptions in identification. While Metz, in this section, focuses primarily on the interruption of visual expectations, with Lost in Translation it might be more productive to look towards audio perception. We are not often challenged in our looking at the film but we are certainly denied hearing. The most notable occurrence of this is, of course, in the final moments of the film when Bob whispers something inaudible into Charlotte’s ear. This scene challenges our status as all-knowing spectator and, just as the bizarre angle might, it “reawakens me and (like the cure) teaches me what I already knew” (700). The audio, up until this point, while perhaps sparse, feels largely “unframed” or natural, though of course, it is not. I’d like to think further about the implications of Metz’s argument as they pertain to sound in film, perhaps this is something we can extend as a class.

Moving away from Metz’s article and towards a discussion of spectatorship at large, I want to bring up the questionnaire Prof. O’Sullivan distributed on the first day of class. The sheet ended with a question about the number of screenings each of us had attended in 2020. Personally, I have not been to a movie theater this year (a combination of graduate stipend budgeting and global pandemic). With particular reference to Baudry and Keathley’s respective pieces—which both speak to the theater/auditorium as the space of spectatorship—I am wondering about how other folks have 1) experienced spectatorship differently (or not) this year and 2) feel that the dark space of a theater lends something to the processes of identification that Metz outlines. I guess part of what I am curious about is that, although the mirror of cinema is unable to reflect me as spectator or the space that I occupy, there is something that feels different (maybe more intimate) about watching a film in my own space as opposed to that of a theater. This, ultimately, is a question of mise en scène, I suppose.