Back Door To Hell

March 30th, 2009 by Nagypál Tamás

Introduction

Danny Boyle’s Oscar-winning film Slumdog Millionaire can be described as an extension of one scene: the hero (Jamal), a teenage boy from the Mumbai ghetto, winning the game show Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? He does this by telling us his life story, putting the personal hardships and traumas of his past into little narratives that somehow magically provide answers to all the questions on the show. The setting itself is full of psychoanalytic overtones. First of all, participating in the game involves playing on TV what in Lacanian terms can be called the “subject supposed to believe”. The contestant faces the authority figure of the host, who acts as the “subject supposed to know” for him, making him look ignorant in front of the audience who’s gaze the spectacle is staged for[1]. Ignorance here means not the lack of some factual knowledge but the fact that the hero believes in the Other’s knowledge, that is, the completeness of the symbolic order, that there is out there a gaze that sees what he cannot see, sees his blind spot, knows all, especially what he doesn’t. In this film, such an illusion of full knowledge refers to the truth about the hero himself. As the story goes, similarly to the analytic situation, the subject has to overcome his reliance of the authority/superego figure of supposed knowledge, that is, his belief in him.

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