ABSTRACT

Chapter three puts into practice Žižek's claim that cinema teaches us how to desire. Starting with Rademakers’ Het mes, it is argued that desire is incessantly frustrated: the satisfying object cannot be appropriated. The film analyses are inspired by the question of what conditions are needed to trigger desire. Films like LIEFDESBEKENTENISSEN and EEN OCHTEND VAN ZES WEKEN demonstrate that love blossoms by virtue of obstacles. Both HAVINCK and DE GROT are centred around a posthumous infatuation with a love object. In DE POOLSE BRUID, desire is mediated by violent acts, whereas the girl in Hemel imitates the behaviour of her Casanova-like father. IN INSTINCT as well as LOOS, sexual desire is used as a trap for a male character.

KEYWORDS

Obscure objects of desire – Courtly love – The virtue of obstacles – A fantasy staged for the sake of the Other

It is pretty clear what piques the thirteen-year-old Thomas in Rademakers’ third feature film, the black-and-white coming-of-age drama HET MES [THE KNIFE] (1961). Since his father passed away eight years ago, his mother is now living with Oscar, who fought in the East Indies, just as Thomas's father had. They both used to have the rank of lieutenant. Thomas hardly knew his father, so he and the girl Toni, with whom he is on close terms, can only talk about him on the basis of rumours and hearsay. When Toni says that his father died of a ‘simple cold’, for he had a ‘weak constitution, like you’, Thomas immediately contradicts her diagnosis and claims that a serious pneumonia proved fatal to him. According to Toni, her mother once said his father was the most beautiful man she had ever seen. But he was also a daredevil who always drove too fast, even at night, Toni asserts, to which Thomas proudly adds that the yokels in the village were ‘scared stiff’ of him.

In the eyes of Thomas, Oscar is an intruder who has disrupted the bond with his mother. Not only does Oscar occupy the empty place left by Thomas's father—that might have been fair enough—he is also far removed from the idealized picture Thomas has of his father.