Director: Peter Webber
Cast: Colin Firth and Scarlett Johansson
Cast: Colin Firth and Scarlett Johansson
The fantasy teaches us how to desire and it is desire which keeps
us ‘alive’, in the sense of seeking an object in reality whose positive
encounter, we believe, would satisfy our desire. According to Zizek, ‘a fantasy
constitutes our desire, provides its coordinates; that is, it literary ‘teaches
us how to desire’ (Zizek: 1997, 7) [1]. Fantasy decides how a man would act in a relationship irrespective
of what he consciously thinks of it, and directs him to develop a desire
towards another human being (in the form of reality or virtuality). In short,
fantasy possesses the capacity to regulate one’s desire and establishes the
fact that there needs to be an intersubjective relationship for us to desire. The desire can change a person’s fate especially
when he finds the object of desire as a worthy cause of pursue of his
existence. Man is capable of sublimating his desirous object (fantasy), when he
could ‘de-sexualize’ it and place it where it becomes immoral. It will then be
appreciated by millions of others in future. What we find ultimately in the
movie ‘The Girl with a Pearl Earring’ is man’s infinite effort to abide by the
above principle to sublimate his desire. What he could not ‘reach’ in
penetrating the woman who carried his final fantasy (or, in other words, the
Impossible), was made immoral through his aesthetic skills. His primary sexual
energy was converted/ diverted to some sublime force to produce an object (in this case,
a painting) which was further away from man’s reach.
Griet, the protagonist of the movie The Girl with a Pear
Earring (2003), comes from a poor family where her father is also a Delftware
painter who is financially bankrupt now. After her father went blind and
subsequently unemployed, she was sent to work in Johannes Vermeer’s household
that is initially portrayed with some mysterious misunderstanding between the
husband and wife, though not obvious. She
continues her duty honestly, while gaining the attention of some butcher boy to
whom she responds slowly. Griet is sometimes treated harshly by Vermeer’s
children and even Vermeer’s wife becomes a bit inquisitive about her going to
the studio which she is never permitted to enter. Griet gained Vermeer’s
attention one day when she busied with cleaning the studio after she made a
comment about color of an on-going painting. After that they became acquainted
and developed strong aesthetic attachment based on taste when Vermeer further
encouraged her appreciation of painting. In the meantime, he used to give her
lessons in mixing painting and related jobs. Her going to the studio and
helping Vermeer was kept as a secret from his wife but Vermeer’s mother-in-law
treated this affair in a pragmatic manner considering her usefulness to his
immediate production of commercial painting. In the meantime, Vermeer’s patron
Van Ruijven, having seen her beauty, demands for Griet to work in his household
which Vermeer denies. However, he agrees to paint a portrait of Griet for
Ruijven.
Once Vermeer started painting Griet, their attachment further grew
and she happened to spend more time in the studio. This is noticed by Vermeer’s
children and later by Catharina (Vermeer’s wife) herself. Vermeer, while
working on the painting, one day pierced her earlobe so that she could wear the
earring for the portrait. Griet, taken by the surprise, ran to the butcher boy
for consolation. Griet is given the pearl
earring which Catharina used to wear during the final days of the completion of
the painting. Catharina, after found out that her pearl earring was worn by
Griet, stormed into the studio she never set foot in before and demanded that
she wanted to see the painting that Vermeer was working on. She was shocked to
see Griet in the painting and wanted to destroy the painting since Vermeer did
not consider her worthy of being painted.
Though she could not destroy the painting she managed to banish Griet
from the house forever. At this point Vermeer becomes silent and Griet leaves
the studio majestically. Later she is visited by the cook from the house
carrying the pearl earrings and the blue headscarf as gift.
Griet
gives her body to completes the journey that her father left unfinished in
producing something ‘sublime’ to make his name ‘immortal’ (from a Western point
of view). In that case, she is the instrument through which Vermeer creates the
‘gaze’ in his painting without which this work could have been just another
drawing of no universal attention. Even his thin lip wife could not give that
‘inspirational’ look for him to see the world through, and for us see who he
was. His wife could not give him this complex feeling about existence. That’s
why he says, ‘you don’t understand’. Griet carries his fantasy to inspire that
painting (which his business-minded mother-in-law understands) but such
fundamental feeling cannot naturally be explained to his wife. Vermeer starts a kind of intimate
communication with her and that inter-subjective relationship made her to make
a ‘sacrifice’ (pierce her ear=penetration) for the completion of the work.
Vermeer does not agree to offer her to his rich client but makes a painting out
of her body to make her beauty sublime for those who appreciate painting. This
‘meeting’ finally produced what man is ultimately capable of. Through the reality of a maid, Vermeer
travels back to fantasy and through fantasy he returns to a fictional element
called a drawing. In this process, the maid became ‘more than herself’; a
symbolic entity where even she does not have a control.
However,
there is a clear line between the Phallus and the non-Phallus; the sexual
enjoyment and ethical goals. Vermeer does not take Griet as a primary sexual
object; the fate of any maid in a household. Instead, may be because of the
contemporary Victorian family values, Vermeer sticks by his own values to be
faithful to his wife. According to Zizek, ‘in the guise of professional
obligations, he is forced to chose between woman and ethical duty’ (Zizek 1994,
152) [2]. What he scarifies here by being ‘public’ is his true happiness by
being with her. This means that his genuine happiness is eared only through a
relationship with her, and his actual personal fulfillment is achieved only
this way. Woman is always aware of this
‘element of sacrifice’ that man readily makes. She knows that his public
movement is just a ‘compensation’ for his guilt of being unethical. What I
suppose in this movie is Griet was aware of his need to be with her (at the
same time, she was also ready to be his fantasy-object) and the her intensified
feeling and readiness to be his love-object lead her to go to so called ‘lover’;
the second- rated substitute who can never replace her original Phallic
signifier; Vermeer. Because of the symbolic order, she cannot express herself
to him, other than her comments about the paintings, but she could pour her
inner complexity out to the ‘butcher boy’. In this case, she does not care what
happens to that boy from the side of his desire. Simply misreading her
expression as a desire for him, he gets caught in her dialogue which is not
made for him.
‘The
impossibility’ here is Vermeer’s ‘need to be with her’ (physical desires) and
the strict Victorian values with which he runs the family. The
painting ‘The Girl with a Pear Earring’ is Vermeer’s sublimation of the impossible
or unfulfilled fantasy- love towards Griet, and, on the other hand, how he
penetrated her was just through her ear. Her loss of maidenhood was demarcated
by submission to be the instrumental object of the painting. Hence, one can
argue that she became a ‘matured woman’ (both physically and psychologically)
through certain non-phallic involvement that finally produced a universal
object of appreciation. From an ordinary point of view, he could not bear her ‘gaze’
and wanted to penetrate it. He found the right lips for his painting (or the
right woman who carried the exact fantasy object). Vermeer’s replacement of his
sexual energy to an immortal object made his existence meaningful to this date.
In this case, we can say that both Griet and Vermeer found true love. They
found it through the renouncement of the primary phallic or through the ‘de-sexualization’
of the relationship. That is how the painting ‘Girl with a Pear Earring’ hangs
before us.
‘If we are to achieve fulfillment through phallic enjoyment, we must renounce it as our explicit goal. Or, in other words, true love can emerge only within a relationship of non-sexual goal’ (Zizek 1994, 152).
[1]
Zizek, Slavoj (1997) The Plague of Fantasies, Verso, London.
[2]
Zizek, Slavoj (1994) The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and
Causality, Verso, London.
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