ABSTRACT

In analyzing the dénouement of DE AANSLAG, chapter nine introduces the notion of ‘identification with the symptom’. This usually concerns a ciphered message addressed to the big Other. For an obsessive neurotic, such a message can be sent to wipe out a certain guilt, as IN DE AANSLAG OR MYSTERIES. The hysteric in ELINE VERE as well as in BLACK BUTTERFLIES is haunted by the question: ‘Who I am for the desire of the Other?’ whereas in the case of perversion, secret contracts and private rituals are at the core of the matter. Perversion manifests itself in many forms in as many types of films, including avant-garde pictures by Zwartjes, a rape revenge comedy (ELLE), a medieval blockbuster (FLESH + BLOOD), and an ‘Edam’ western (BRIMSTONE).

KEYWORDS

Identification with the symptom – Ciphered messages to the big Other – Neurosis and Hysteria – Perversion: Secret contracts

At the end of Rademakers’ DE AANSLAG (1986), already partially discussed in chapter seven, Anton Steenwijk suffers from a terrible toothache. It is 1983, so it is 38 years after the film's titular incident. A befriended dentist is prepared to relieve him from his pain on condition that Anton joins the mass demonstration against nuclear weapons that is taking place in Amsterdam. Among the crowd, a 60-year-old woman tries to attract his attention, but he does not immediately recognize his former neighbour Karin Korteweg. As soon as she mentions her name, Anton immediately recalls an early erotic memory: in the first minutes of the film, the then twelve-year-old boy was at her place and Karin pulled up a leg so she could put on a long stocking, giving him the opportunity to almost peep between her thighs. Back in the present, people dressed as skeletons carrying a coffin with the word ‘humanity’ on it pass by them in the demonstration. Amidst the protesters, Karin tells Anton that his older brother Peter had threatened her and her father with a gun on that evening of the assault, January 1945: he was angry that the Kortewegs had moved the dead body of Fake Ploeg in front of the house of the Steenwijks.