American Imago

The Ploughman’s Lunch (1983)

In the title scene Tom Fox, a director of TV commercials, tells James Penfield, a BBC Radio journalist, that the pub meal of bread, cheese, and pickle is “a completely successful fabrication of the past.” According to Fox, the ploughman’s lunch is not an archaic British tradition but the invention of a 1960s advertising campaign designed to get people to eat in pubs. This conversation links with the film’s larger questions of popular memory and the writing of history, since Fox is making a commercial which depicts an idealized British family of the interwar years, and has previously had a good response to a commercial featuring kings and queens of England. The question of history and popular memory is first posed at the very beginning of the film, when BBC Radio announces that afternoon’s lineup for “Woman’s Hour”—“Commander Freddy Bracknell” will discuss his experiences in a German POW camp, “the mountaineer John Clayton will be reliving the thrills and perils of Everest,” and “the historian Professor John Gerty” will discuss how Eastern European governments “distort their recent past.” In other words, that day’s “Woman’s Hour” will be flagrantly ideological; encounters with two key components of the postwar national myth of achievement in adversity will be followed by an account of how the Cold War enemy cannot be trusted with the historical record.

For his own part, Penfield is working on a revisionist history of Suez which will “get away completely from all the moralizing and the talk of national humiliation that is now the standard line.” In this pursuit, he duplicitously seeks advice from the TV director’s wife, Anne Barrington, a prominent left-wing historian who once planned to write her own book on Suez. Barrington is modelled, loosely but definitely, on E. P. and Dorothy Thompson. Like the former, she had a brother whose death in Greece at the end of World War Two inspired political commitment, sees 1956 as defining for a generation, [End Page 174] is friendly with East Bloc dissidents, is identified with the peace movement, and lives in the country; like the latter, she has written books on Chartism. The gender reversal (the bulk of Anne Barrington’s characteristics belong to E. P. Thompson) seems calculated, along with the visit to a women’s peace camp, to provide the film with alternatives to the idea of femininity represented by Thatcher.

Now critics have disputed Fox’s claim about the ploughman’s lunch as “inaccurate” and cynical. Overtly, their point is that agricultural workers did eat bread and cheese, an argument which is presented as a matter of historical fact. Implicitly, their response militates against the idea that anything begins with representation, that modern media are effective inventors of tradition—possibilities particularly troubling for a culture which places a nearly mystagogical emphasis on tradition. What I want to suggest is that while no advertising campaign could have invented the Real of the need to eat, it is perfectly reasonable to understand the naming of this pub dish as highly overdetermined. Britain is a country in which an agrarian gentry practising a “capitalist agriculture” accumulated the capital for the world’s first industrial revolution, and then proceeded to subordinate both agriculture and industry to empire, commerce, and finance. The point is underscored when Fox says to Penfield: “We might have led world once into the industrial revolution; now we lead with television commercials.” One result of this capitalism historically prior to industry, with its peculiar amalgam of economic modernization and ideological atavism, is that this most urbanized of countries, whose peasantry had largely disappeared by 1750, remains obsessed with signifiers of the countryside, of which the “ploughman’s lunch” is a typical examples.

However, if there is a signal difference between historical ploughmen eating bread and cheese and the “ploughman’s lunch” served in a London pub to a customer who is almost certainly not a ploughman, it is not fully accounted for either by Fox’s argument that a historical myth has been conjured by the consumer culture or his critics’ reply that the claim of the ploughman’s lunch on history is authentic. Instead, I would argue that both the contemporary meal and the disputed [End Page 175] historical one are realities designated by the signifier, and that both are premised on the “nihilation” of the Real of the body, the Real of the need to eat. Of course a meal fulfils the need to eat, but as Lévi-Strauss has long since established, “culinary procedures” particularly and decisively mark culture off from nature (64). To insert the present terms into a previous formula, the point is not simply that bread and cheese will signify in different ways at different historical moments, but that they will always signify in some way; only in extremis is the Real not nihilated by the signifier. None of this is to suggest that we cannot adjudicate between more and less convincing historical claims; it is to say that we need to understand the difference between reality and the Real in both historical and contemporary settings, and that such an understanding complicates the idea of a past in which Real needs were simply satisfied. In its eagerness to decry the facility of Fox and the opportunism of Penfield, criticism has missed the point that historical meanings are signifiers; any and every history designates a reality which it retrieves from the Real.

I have lingered on the discussion of the title scene because it establishes a protocol which will help us to understand the Real of desire and the Real of history, encounters with which are superimposed by the film’s central allegory. The Ploughman’s Lunch originally appeared at the late 1970s/early 1980s moment of a concerted critical effort to rescue allegory from its formerly discredited status and to rethink it as one model of a textuality based on mutually interfering, even irreconcilable meanings. Paul de Man pioneered in this direction, but with his commentary on the complicity of allegorical artists with the mass media, and his suggestion that the allegory emerged in response to the defeat of the Utopian projects of the 1960s, it is Craig Owens who is most relevant to The Ploughman’s Lunch, with its affectless, dispirited protagonist, whose amorous ruses parallel the great-power machinations of Britain, France, the United States, and Egypt in the Suez crisis of 1956.

The distinctly allegorical cast of a film which is at the same time determined to remain naturalistically plausible is, as Sheila Johnston has suggested (108), most evident in its characters’ names. The journalist protagonist is named Penfield, [End Page 176] a prosperous publisher is named Gold, a womanizer is named Fox, a romantic deceiver is named Hancock, and the object of desire has a nickname, Susie, homophonous with Suez. Secondly (and most obviously, Owens echoing Northrop Frye’s remark that allegories tend to prescribe the direction of their own commentaries (69)) Penfield’s tactic of romancing Susan Barrington by making up to her mother is mapped onto the 1956 deceit by which Britain and France encouraged Israel to prepare an attack on Egypt as a pretext to invade and retake the Suez Canal. As Hancock puts it, “Your way into the daughter’s pants is through the mother, up the Suez Canal,” a birth or vaginal image which draws from Penfield the response “You’re so gross.” To spell it out, Penfield is like Britain in 1956 insofar as his strategem backfires disastrously, leaving him chastened and bereft, even if by the very end of the film he has recovered enough to celebrate the publication of his book and treat his mother’s funeral as just another demand on his time. At the same time, The Ploughman’s Lunch is an allegory which should be read not as a schema but as an open question—if we say that both Britain in 1956 and Penfield in 1982 engage in dishonest maneuvering in pursuit of a desired object, we are not trivializing history but rethinking the conventional understanding of historical motives.

If we are slow to pick up on all this, the film provides us with a polytechnic lecturer whose work concerns whether nations can be held to the same moral standards as individuals, or (given events in both Suez and the film) whether nations and individuals suffer similarly from a lack of morals. At one point, stressing that Britain and France were motivated less by practical considerations and more by questions of symbolic prestige, the lecturer suggests that Suez was “an affair of the heart.” In modern British history, Suez is a signifier particularly capable of redesignating a reality, since it is commonly considered to inaugurate the consciousness of decline to which Thatcherism is one response and against which Penfield’s book is intended to militate. This consciousness, intensifying in the late 1950s and early 1960s, followed nearly eighty years upon the initial actuality of decline, which Hobsbaum and Gamble date from the moment in the 1880s at which the [End Page 177] United States and Germany began to pioneer in chemical and electrical industries while Britain turned to the captive markets of its empire. Yet insofar as the British empire was the largest and most lucrative in history, there is a sense in which its solution to the late nineteenth-century problem of the British economy, however exploitative and temporary, was also effective, so that the new consciousness of decline after 1956 did mark a qualitatively different experience.

Even so, the mapping of the unpleasant maneuverings of Penfield onto those of his country some twenty-five years earlier still risks concluding in a moral as trite as “all’s fair in love and war.” What saves the film from this is that the skirmishes concerning Suez and Susie are set in a historical moment capable of reconfiguring them both. This is the moment at which the Real of the Falklands/Malvinas war obtrudes into the circuits of a bleakly British reality, with the result that a new reality is designated; the film observes the first moments of “Thatcherism” proper. I am aware of the argument that the ground of Thatcherism was prepared throughout the 1970s, and of the disputed status of the “Falklands factor.” However, whether or not the military success in the South Atlantic can be credited with the Conservatives’ 1983 election win and 1984–85 victory over the “enemy within,” there is little doubt that the brief war of 1982 was decisive in consolidating Thatcher’s previously very weak position; the wave of popular support for militarism rescued the first Thatcher government from likely perdition. As Tom Nairn put it in July 1982: “The scent of righteous blood turned the most unpopular government since 1939 into a nationalist saviour, the redeemer of the British soul. Churchill’s mantle has been taken from the cupboard and dusted down” (283).

The symbolization of the Falklands/Malvinas war, which represents the inauguration of Thatcherism per se, and suggests the extent to which its triumph was ideological, proceeds apace throughout The Ploughman’s Lunch. In the very first shot, a teleprinter message on Conservative Chancellor Sir Geoffrey Howe’s business-as-usual determination to squeeze inflation out of the economy by keeping wage claims low is followed by the report of a navy ship moving towards South Georgia. [End Page 178] Moments later, the first story filed by Penfield is the first story of the Falklands War, the landing of some scrap merchants on the same island. Later yet, Penfield and Hancock sit within earshot of a television which speaks of “the Royal Navy” in the reverential tones reserved for State and historic occasions, and drink to “the Fleet . . . and the Argies.” Still later, Penfield hurries past TVs emitting cheers and jet noises, and Hancock talks about his newspaper’s sudden interest in the rights of Argentinian workers. By the end of the film, we are accustomed to talk of “this Falklands business,” or in the case of the peace camp women, “this Falklands madness.”

As a film about media people, The Ploughman’s Lunch is able to have its naturalistic cake and eat it too; it depicts a world in which everything is mediated without obvious departures from what Sheila Johnston calls a “realist, almost transparent mise-en-scène” (108). Notice, however, that the symbolization of the Falklands/Malvinas war takes place entirely on the soundtrack, by way of overhead news sources and conversations among the film’s journalistic and political types. Suez appears on the image track in a sequence in which Susan Barrington screens period newsreel footage for Penfield, but nothing comparable is done with the Falklands. This suggests the more general significance of the soundtrack, similar to the film’s allegorical strategy in its combination of understatement and insistence. The film begins, as I have noted, with the chattering of teleprinters and typewriters, a standard metonymy for the news once regularly incorporated into news theme music. This is followed by BBC radio voices, Godardian swellings of non-diegetic classical music, a weather forecast at Penfield’s flat, horseracing commentary in Penfield’s father’s sitting room, a jazz piano record at Hancock’s flat, the noise of a pinball machine at the polytechnic, and a tape recording of the polytechnic lecturer. This last places a particular emphasis on mediation, as we pass suddenly across a cut from a scene in which Penfield is shown making the recording to a scene in which he is playing the resulting tape. This tactic, whose carefully contained modernism is calculated to remind us that The Ploughman’s Lunch is itself a product of mediation and recording, is repeated and varied in the film’s play with jet [End Page 179] noise. At three different moments, jet sound signifies the background televising of the Falklands War, the bustle of London, and the U.S. military presence in East Anglia.

These sounds and voices, not all of them decidable (is the cheering we hear on TV in fact about the Falklands?), also alert us to the film’s persistent use of the sound bridge. This technique, most famously associated with Citizen Kane, begins the sound of a particular shot or scene before we cut to it on the image track. Thus we hear Susan Barrington beginning to distance herself from feminism over the closing frames of the previous shot, and beginning to describe her relationship with her mother over the closing frames of the previous scene. Elsewhere, we begin to hear the voice of the TV announcer before we cut to the scene in the bar, and begin to hear an outburst of group laughter before we cut to the after dinner scene at the Barringtons. Consistent with this, though not strictly sound bridging, is dramatic anticipation by way of sound. We hear the voice of the polytechnic lecturer from the hallway before we enter his classroom, hear the soundtrack of Fox’s TV commercial before we see the set, and at the Tory Party conference, hear the shouts of protest long before we see the protesters. This all prepares for the climactic scene in which Thatcher’s triumphalist invocation of “the spirit of the South Atlantic” is the setting for Penfield’s discovery that he has been romantically outmaneuvered by his best friend; the Tory speakers, who include Francis Pym and Michael Heseltine as well as Thatcher, are methodically introduced voice-first. At the very end of the film, in a reversal of previous practice, the image freezes on Penfield looking at his watch at his mother’s graveside while the voice of the vicar conducting the funeral service continues.

The film’s displacement of sounds and disembodiment of voices is the most subtle and effective of its allegorical tactics; it is just when the much-remarked voice of Thatcher has succeeded in retrieving a politically effective reality from the historical Real of the Falklands/Malvinas war that Penfield recognizes the ruinous reality which has derived from the Real of his desire. After Thatcher has finished speaking, he sits disconsolate and silent, drowning in the sounds of a standing [End Page 180] ovation and “Land of Hope and Glory.” Moments later, a distant longshot of the deserted conference floor shows him responding to his realization (or Realization) with angry sounds, screaming at Hancock “I can’t believe it, you fucking set me up.”

Preoccupied with triangulating, Penfield does not see that he is being triangulated. At first sight, then, he is the typical Imaginary fantasist, defeated by an exigency of the Symbolic. The farcical Oedipal victory which brings Anne Barrington unwanted to his bed prepares only for the decisive Oedipal defeat in which he loses her daughter; the rivalry he anticipates is defused by the complaisance of Tom Fox, while the rivalry he fails to notice is fatal to his hopes. Yet the displacement of voices is a clue to something in the film which is more like a psychotic foreclosure than a neurotic drama. The point is underscored when Penfield’s colleague, the BBC Radio news voice of ideological legend, is revealed to be undergoing a shattering breakup which has not the slightest effect on his calmly authoritative delivery. Surrounded by voices, a professional of the voice, Penfield nonetheless has a very distant relationship with the mother’s voice which Lacan includes on the list of primal objects (Ecrits 817/315). He is deaf to his biological mother’s pathetic appeals, and responds to Susan Barrington’s story of re-establishing intimacy with her mother by consigning his parents to the Real, claiming that they are both dead. Confronted at the women’s peace camp by a mother complete with baby, he listens apparently politely to her determined voice, but later dismisses her group as “vegetarians, hippies, disturbed housewives.” A similar hypocrisy is applied to the maternal solicitations of the old left, when Penfield allows Anne Barrington to utterly misread him as someone who can be relied on “to take the uncomfortable stands in life.” Climactically, then, Penfield comes face to face (or ear to ear) with the celebrated elocution-trained voice of Margaret Thatcher, whose maternal image may be suggested if we describe her as the governess who would see off the nanny. Thatcher notoriously idolized her father, repudiated her mother, and doted on her son; ² her speech fits the bill of this phallocentric maternity with its approving commentary on the [End Page 181] young people who “fought and lived and died” in the Falklands. Thatcher might in fact make an appropriate maternal imago for a lower middle class arriviste like Penfield, but the burden of my argument is that Penfield finds it difficult to effectively symbolize any kind of mother; for him, mothers are impossible-Real objects.

One result is that The Ploughman’s Lunch is a depressing film. Offering little comfort to its art house and Channel Four audiences, it does grim justice to the birth of Thatcherism, the depths of the second cold war, the exhaustion of the hopes of the 1960s, the crisis of the British culture of opposition, and the empty professionalism of its principals, who gape with boredom even as their doctrine of even-handedness is expounded in an editorial meeting. Yet the film is not as “misanthropic” as Sheila Johnston thinks (109). Its understated yet determined handling of voices and maternal images means that it never endorses the attitudes of its protagonist, who rather represents a bankrupt consensus, moving blankly between a resurgent right, a pacified old left, and a women’s peace movement whose tactical innovations had yet to gain recognition. For all its anomie, The Ploughman’s Lunch is more sophisticated about history than the “heritage” films made in Britain throughout the 1980s.

Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987)

In Stephen Frears and Hanif Kureishi’s Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, with its ghosts and disembodied voices, the idea of an interface between reality and the Real is both directly thematized and yet contained within the fiction; as in The Ploughman’s Lunch, it is the characters who fail to symbolize the film’s most politically important signifiers, and this failure is relayed to the putatively normal spectator.

The film begins and ends with the voice of Margaret Thatcher floating over the wastelands of inner London. At the very beginning, before the title, credits, and jaunty opening theme, we see a long shot of a piece of waste ground with a fence in front of it, a motorway to the right, and a metal bridge [End Page 182] at the rear. Smoke rises, the sun shines weakly on the leafless trees, and two figures move in the distance. On the soundtrack, we hear a fragment of Thatcher’s impromptu victory address on election night 1987. This election, which took place during the production of the film, was not as numerically crushing as that of 1983, but as Thatcher’s third consecutive victory, was even more debilitating for opposition hopes, causing Stuart Hall to title a commentary “Blue Election, Election Blues” (Hard Road 259–67). In his production diary, Hanif Kureishi speaks of canvassing for Labour in hostile tower blocks, and of the Labour Party losing the inner-London seat in question, which it had taken from Thatcher in a bye-election in 1985 (125). He also tells us that the opening shot and the use of Thatcher’s voice were ideas of Stephen Frears (126).

Thatcher begins by saying that “we have a great deal of work to do, so no-one must slack,” presumably warning against complacent enjoyment among the party faithful, but is interrupted by laughter. Sufficiently humorless that jokes included in Cabinet briefings had to be explained to her, Thatcher perhaps does not anticipate this reaction. When a voice emerges from the laughter with “How about a party tonight?,” she gives permission, but qualifies it with a reminder to clean up, and then returns to her theme that work lies ahead: “You can have a party tonight, you will have a marvellous party tonight, and you can clear up tomorrow, but on Monday, you know, we’ve a got a big job to do in some of those inner cities.”

Immediately, this is an irony, since the voice so conceptually distant from the realities of the inner city is speaking from a location, Conservative Central Office, just a few miles from that of the image, in West London. Furthermore, the cities were to remain the unfinished business of Thatcherism. As Peter Wollen points out, the “two nations” Toryism which abandoned the deindustrialized North in favor of the commercial and consumer South was reproduced within the capital, with Thatcher’s suburban/Westminster axis set against the bohemian, immigrant, and redevelopment enclaves of inner London (35). Further yet, the “job to do” which the naive auditor might take to be the solution of social problems turns out to be redevelopment; Thatcher’s voice sets the gentrification [End Page 183] agenda for a film which makes much of the polarization between the inner city and its leafy suburbs, and ends with a property developer riding a bulldozer into an anarchist encampment calling the battle cry of the miners during the 1984–85 strike, “Here we go, here we go, here we go.” This next-to-last scene in the film, returns to the now quite crowded location of the opening shot, and once again we hear Thatcher’s voice, this time on taking office in 1979 with a prayer for “harmony . . . truth . . . faith . . . (and) hope.”

The opening shot is typical of the compromises of art cinema in that it comes close, for the few seconds before the narrative begins, to a more liberated kind of filmmaking. Its image of a terrain vague created, abandoned, and then repossessed by development suggests destitution or desolation, and is calculated to contrast with the ebullience of the crowd at Conservative Central Office; we might read the image as the designation of a bleak actuality, which comments decisively on the wishful projections of Thatcher. However, the rest of the film shows us that this interstitial urban space has been colonized by transients who are carnivalesque musicians, bohemian Afro-Caribbeans, and ragamuffin anarchists. Laying claim to a poetic tradition of London anomie by painting their caravans with the words of T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and Blake’s “London,” these figures anticipate the dissident subculture of “new age travellers” who later caused a moral panic in the media and Parliament.

The complexity of the scene in which the travellers are removed from their site (like an earlier party, it brings together all six of the film’s principals) means that the second appearance of Thatcher’s voice is not just an echo but a reply. This is so insofar as the victory of capitalism (no space in the city will be left undeveloped) is treated by the anarchist processional with the gestural defiance of flying flags and upraised arms; the screenplay tells us that Kureishi rather romantically imagined the departing convoy like the PLO leaving Beirut (56). At the same time, Thatcher’s voice is one element in a mix which also includes the voice of the property developer, a nineteenth-century patriotic hymn “I Vow To Thee My Country,” and the trumpets of the anarchists. At the [End Page 184] succeeding and final scene back at Sammy and Rosie’s flat, a political circuit is completed when we learn that the caravans are moving to Westminster, though not to Parliament but under the bridge.

Thus the film is bracketed or contained within the reality designated by the Thatcher-signifier, especially if we go along with the screenplay’s suggestion that the beginning of the film is really its end, that the image of the deserted site shows the situation after the travellers have been driven off. This reversal certainly clarifies Frears’ decision to use Thatcher’s 1987 speech at the beginning of the film and her 1979 one at the end, and reinforces the sense of political limits also suggested in the title. At the same time, the film’s figure of the Indian cab driver/ghost thematizes the return in the Real of the signifiers excluded from symbolization. At first, appearing as the bandaged, one-eyed cab driver who brings the Asian patriarch Rafi from the airport and drops him off with a sardonic remark on his son’s neighborhood, this figure is locatable in reality. However, his six or seven re-appearances are reinscribed as so many hallucinatory returns in the Real from the moment at which he vanishes in a process shot outside Sammy and Rosie’s door. In fact, once we understand the question of his reality-status, we reread as ghostly the eerie yellow light and fixed grin of the shot in which he drops Rafi.

The extent to which Rafi in particular is subject to significations which he cannot readily symbolize is underscored by his encounter in the restaurant with a sausage which turns into a human finger, by his encounter in Danny’s caravan with a basin full of blood and bones, and by his waking from a disturbing dream to a highly condensed image in which Virginia Woolf appears behind a net curtain above a row of yellow flames. The picture of Virginia Woolf is an icon from the study of Rafi’s daughter-in-law Rosie, the net curtain is in its own way an icon of British décor, and the votive flames are linked by metonymy to the violent streets outside, especially insofar as a film fearful of boring a British audience weary of regularly-televised urban disturbances stylizes its main uprising sequence with flames in every window.

Elsewhere, I have argued that the image of a protagonist [End Page 185] waking from a disturbing dream is a metacinematic trope common in narrative films (1983). Such images suggest the relay between the spectator, whose experience of darkness and immobility approaches the condition of sleep and dreams, and the character, who must rise and move in order to solve a narrative enigma. In the particular case of Sammy and Rosie, the image borne in upon the frightened Rafi in a swift series of shots and reverses also suggests the film’s basic crisis of symbolic paternity. Rafi is the English-educated ex-minister of a national liberation government who returns to Britain after twenty years to find the streets in turmoil and the metropolitan left strongly influenced by feminism and questions of human rights. Friendly with Krushchev but morally traditional, anticolonial but still inclined to think of London as the “center of civilization,” Rafi veers comically between making common cause with Rosie’s Afro-Caribbean boyfriend and horror at the open lesbianism of her Asian friends. His patriarchal project, to endow Sammy and Rosie on the condition that they move to a part of England “not twinned with Beirut” and have a child, runs foul of Rosie’s research into his torture of political opponents and the couple’s unreadiness for parenthood. Sammy feels, not unreasonably, that he has been abandoned by his father, while Rosie tells a story of being routinely beaten by her father, a suburban mayor.

According to Lacan, one hallmark of psychosis is the failure of the paternal metaphor; prominent among the fundamental signifiers which the psychotic cannot locate in the Symbolic is the Name-of-the-Father. Thus the onset of psychosis is typically marked by some crisis in paternity (a promotion, an inheritance, even an abortion). There is no doubt that Sammy and Rosie Get Laid concerns the failure of a paternal metaphor, and no doubt that the increasingly dramatic signifiers which return in the Real are focalized around the figure of Rafi, but this is not to say that we read him as a psychotic. This is partly because the ghost is a figure of mourning, and as John Muller points out, mourning is the state in which the “normal” subject comes closest to psychosis; it is also because the film is focussed on a “social psychosis” of the type discussed by Teresa Brennan in “History After Lacan.”

This is to say that the hallucinations visited upon Rafi are [End Page 186] not private, but social and political signifiers; in the dinner-table confrontation with Rosie, Rafi argues that his ends justified his brutal means, a logic repeated with bitter irony when the ghost, in his final horrific appearance, describes his torture as “the price to be paid for the overall good of our sad country.” Another of Rafi’s arguments, unpersuasive but still partly telling, is that he comes “from a land ground into the dust by 200 years of imperialism,” and that he only used the methods the West had taught him. This is to suggest that instead of sharply distinguishing between psychotic and normal individuals, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid implicates all of its main characters in the historical psychosis of metropolis and periphery, thus effecting a kind of relay between the increasingly troubled subjectivity of the post-colonial and the bohemian subjectivity of the eponymous Sammy and Rosie.

As I have said, the ghost first appears in the naturalistic guise of cab driver, and the sausage which turns into a finger is motivated by Rosie’s dinner-table insistence on discussing Rafi’s past. Moreover, the process shot in which the ghost is first revealed as such follows a shot in which it is not Rafi but Sammy who glances out of a window and sees the ghost lighting a cigarette on the pavement below. This evidence that the Real is not returned exclusively to Rafi is underscored in the process shot, when the first half of an eyeline match (Rafi looking screen right) is followed by a shot in which the ghost is seen from an angle corresponding to the point-of-view not of Rafi, but of Rosie and her boyfriend Danny. It is worth remarking that Kureishi’s production diary describes the shooting of this sequence as particularly difficult, so that the eyeline contradiction may not have been fully or simply intended. To add to this list of signifiers presented as engaging with the Real, we might also return to the portrait of Virginia Woolf. First appearing as a significant detail on the wall of Rosie’s study, it next occurs much more imposingly in Rafi’s nightmare or waking dream. Finally, the icon pops up in a new position (together with a portrait of Lacan) when Rosie has decided to leave Sammy and is dividing their possessions; unless we assume that one prepares to move out by rehanging one’s pictures, this is a signifier which leads a life of its own. To round off this list, we might also consider the film’s second [End Page 187] process shot, in which the now naked ghost materializes at screen right and flits across the waste ground outside Danny’s caravan. This shot is proximate to the subjectivity of Rafi, since it is preceded by a sequence in which the ghost follows him along the street and down an alleyway, and followed by the climactic sequence in which the ghost materializes inside the caravan and places the torture-helmet on Rafi’s head. Yet it is not directly presented as Rafi’s point of view, and differs from all other depictions of the ghost (with the exception of the shot outside Sammy and Rosie’s door) in that it is a superimposition, with the background at all times visible through the body.

As normal subjects, we understand that Rafi is haunted, attended by a ghost; Sammy and Rosie redeploys a convention familiar from Hamlet through Great Expectations to Beloved, from nineteenth-century spirit photography through Vampyr to Ghost. At the end of the film, as the ghost wreaks vengeance on Rafi, the Dickensian intertext is underscored by the forgotten lover Alice, whose angry display of the contents of a trunk evokes the spurned bride Miss Havisham. Yet I have premised my whole discussion on Lacan’s analysis of normal subjectivity as most profoundly hallucinated. Thus the film’s conventionalized departures from a conventionalized realist texture are most productively understood as an entire series of returns in the Real, which are not only centered around a single character and then relayed to the other principals, but also calculated to make an impression on the putatively normal subjectivity of the spectator.