ARTICLE

The New Psyche: A Model of Different Femininity

in Film
Viviane Amsalem, Heroine of the Trilogy by Ronit and Shlomi Elkabetz

Macabit Abramson

ABSTRACT
This article focuses on a feminine character who may be seen as a New Psyche,
as she appears in lms that correspond to the ancient myth of Eros and Psyche. In
these lms the heroine is a dichotomous gure, containing the conicting personae
of beauty and beast and rebelling against gender denitions. The character
of Viviane Amsalem in the lm trilogy directed by Ronit and Shlomi Elkabetz will
serve as a case study. Viviane Amsalems gentle and silenced character hides a
dark, instinctive power. She undertakes a dangerous course of action in which she
reveals the male beast within her, repressed in the dark gure of the Freudian
primordial father. Only then does she succeed in breaking the bonds of society
to gain her individual feminine identity.
In the end she portrays a woman who contains the contradictions within her
even as she strives for a different social order. The echo of the ancient myth in
the trilogy is critical of the present world, in which there is as yet no place for the
feminine model of the New Psyche.

This article focuses on a feminine character who may be seen as the New Psyche,
as she appears in cinematic texts that correspond to the ancient myth of Eros
and Psyche. This woman wants to change the world, transforming it into a place
where she can live with a man while maintaining her independence, difference,
and absolute separateness from him. In contrast to the vengeful, aggressive, dark

Jewish Film & New Media, Vol. 4, No. 1, Spring 2016, pp. 4367. Copyright 2016 Wayne State University Press, Detroit, MI 48201-1309. | 43
44 | The New Psyche: A Model of Different Femininity in Film

female, the New Psyche is idealistic, moral, and striving for a relationship and
human connection, but at the same time she is adventurous and courageous
enough to break down barriers without expecting agreement and acceptance.
She possesses personal strength that pushes her to think and to fulll her desires,
despite the opposition of society and the man who stands in her way, thus realizing
her uniqueness and personal voice, which differs from the accepted norms. Her
character serves as a model for a different woman: She stands out from her
environment; she is a leader in the movement for change; and she is individualistic
and distinctive in relation to the hegemonic society.
We can trace the cultural footsteps of this character through analysis of the
heroine in the myth of Eros and Psyche, from the second-century Roman writer
Apuleiuss The Golden Ass, and follow her through her various transformations in
lm.1 To trace the different expressions of her character in various appearances,
I will follow two tracks: First, I present the model of a different femininityas
observed among womens depictions in lmsas part of my interdisciplinary
cultural research. Second, I devote the central part of the article to an analysis
of the character of Viviane Amsalem (Ronit Elkabetz), the Moroccan woman in
the cinematic trilogy directed by Ronit and Shlomi Elkabetz which includes To
Take a Wife (2004),2 Seven Days (2008),3 and Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem
(2014).4 What might the connection be among the character of the traditional,
Mizrahi Jewish woman in Israeli movies, the Western women (mostly blondes)5
in foreign lms, and the heroine of a pagan Western myth? I propose that the link
among these women, belonging to different cultures and periods in time, is that
of a different femininity: one that poses a dilemma as an entity that remains
unresolved in the patriarchal society. I propose that the model of a different
femininity in lms includes not only blonde Western women but also black-haired
Mizrahi women. Viviane will serve as a case study for the character of the New
Psyche. Her gentle and silenced character hides a dark, instinctive power. She
undertakes a dangerous course of action by which she reveals the male beast
within her, repressed in the gure of the primordial father6: ancient, dark, and
wild. Only then does she succeed in breaking the bonds of society to gain her
place in the world, and an individual feminine identity.
 Macabit Abramson | 45

The Model of a Different Femininity in Film

In the ancient myth, Psyche is a princess; she is considered the most beautiful
woman in the world, and she arouses the envy of Venus.7 She is sacriced to the
dragon by her father, as a result of a prophecy made by the oracle. Eros saves
Psyche and keeps her hidden away in his palace, but forbids her to look at him.
Psyche suspects Eros of being the dragon and disobeys his command. Eros leaves
her, and Psyche sets out on a lonely journey to bring him back, during which she
performs the dangerous tasks imposed on her by Venus. In the end Psyche marries
Eros on Mount Olympus and bears him a daughter.
In his essay The Spiritual Development of the Feminine Element, Erich
Neumann analyzes the myth of Eros and Psyche as a journey of individuation for
the female heroine.8 He claims that Psyche does not accept the power relationship
and oppression the male tries to impose on her, and she seeks mutual, personal,
and reciprocal love. Only when she achieves this does she fulll her love for Eros
on Mount Olympus. From this one can conclude that Psyche transforms the
Western dichotomyaccording to which the man represents intellect and form
while the woman represents matter and naturewhen she renounces the material
values and hedonism proposed by Eros and strives for a spiritual relationship
and mutual recognition. She is a female gure who leads a social and cultural
revolution with her yearning for personal freedom and equality in love in the
face of a patriarchal, materialistic, and belligerent world.
In my doctoral thesis, The New Psyche in Movies: Journey against a Dark Man,
I present a female character who appears in classic and contemporary movies and
corresponds to the ancient Psyche: Like her, she undertakes a journey of feminine
individuation.9 The classic lms are referred to as Beauty and the Beast lms,10
and they include Jean Cocteaus 1946 Beauty and the Beast (France);11 Merian
Cooper and Ernest Schoedsaks 1933 King Kong (USA);12 and Rupert Julians
1925 The Phantom of the Opera (USA).13 The contemporary lms are referred to
here as New Psyche lms, and they include David Cronenbergs 2007 Eastern
Promises (USA),14 Sally Potters 2005 Yes (UK),15 and David Lynchs 1990 Wild
at Heart (USA).16
In these movies the heroine is a dichotomous gure: Both beauty and beast,
she rebels against gender denitions. She is feminine: beautiful, loving, caring,
sensitive, soft, and gentle. She empathizes and seeks togetherness and dialogue,
and thus ts the denition of beauty. But she also has masculine tendencies:
She yearns to fulll herself in the world, regardless of those around her; she is
46 | The New Psyche: A Model of Different Femininity in Film

ambitious, adventurous, and untamed. And from this angle she ts the denition
of beast.17
The inner tension between the opposing poles of her character, and her yearning
for complete existence in the world, oblige her to undertake a dramatic journey
of individuation. Along the way she comes upon a dark and threatening male
gurethe man-beast. This traumatizes her and endangers her emotional and
physical wellbeing. She fashions a close and loving relationship with him but does
not submit to his requests for pleasuring him. In confronting him she discovers her
instincts and strength, as well as her unique femininity as one who can love and
accept the other. Her claims from the dark man are emotional and moral. They
bring about a change and transformation in him, as he evolves from a man-beast to
a loving man. As a result of her relationship with him, she discovers within herself
the beast alongside the beauty. The novelty in this character is that she not
only discovers the beauty in the man-beast but also legitimizes and makes room
for the dark, suppressed side of herself; she thereby gains strength through this
revelationa process that enjoys greater legitimacy in the present era.
My study refers to the possibility of a two-way relationship between the sexes,
and to the womans complex need for a man to enable her to discover her own
identity. I propose that, precisely at the point of trauma, she is forced to break
out of the trap of passivity and victimization that characterizes her life in the
patriarchal society, to release her own voice and be free, to be transformed into
an active woman and create a different orderone in which she can exist as an
independent being, equal to but different from the man.
The paradoxical process of female individuation through the encounter with a
dark man results from the built-in tension in the individual and dual character
of the New Psyche. In contrast to the woman who, like Venus, cooperates with
the male order, within which the male is the central focus of her being, the New
Psyche needs the idea of a different femininity in order to exist fully in the world.
To describe the different femininity expressed in her hybrid character, I propose
a connection among terms from varied, sometimes conicting, theoretical areas.
This is a model of femininity that combines myth, the blonde phenomenon,18
psychoanalysis, and feminism with an analysis of the ancient myth of Eros and
Psyche and the lms that correspond to it.19 A diversied analysis of texts from the
literature, lmography, and reference works enables one to construct an in-depth
portrait of the individualistic female character, past and present.20
 Macabit Abramson | 47

The Three-Stage Journey of Feminine Individuation

The paradoxical gure of the New Psyche, with its polar opposites of beauty
and beast, undergoes a hazardous process during which she breaks down barriers
on her way to redening her place in the world. She embarks on a three-stage
journey that can be analyzed in terms of the Lacanian orders21 (symbolic, real,
and imaginary), which recall the three stages of the psychoanalytic process:
from the symbolic, through the imaginary, to the real.22
In the model I propose, the imaginary order is presented as the end of the
journey, although it belongs between the extremes of symbolic and real, and
it resembles the process of creating the subject, as dened by Lacan.
The actual worldthe family and society in the lmsrepresents the symbolic
order: the domain of culture, ruled by paternal law, in which the woman is depicted
as a submissive, passive victim. In desperation the woman abandons this world
and journeys to the world of the beast, which is interpreted as signifying the
real order that cannot be expressed in words and comprises a degree of distress
and trauma. This world is controlled by a dark man (the beast) or, as Slavoj
iek refers to him, the anal father, who experiences pleasure when his desires
overcome all bounds of taboo and law.23 He arouses the woman to her unknown
desire for sexuality, death, jouissance, and domination.24 When she recognizes
his dark essence, she refuses to comply and be enslaved to his desire for power
and control; she insists on moral values and equality in their relationship. In
the nal stage of the journey, represented by the imaginary orderthe sphere
of imagery and imagination in which subjectivity arisesthe gender conict is
solved in a third dimension, which unites inherent contradictions and enables
reciprocal love, as desired by the woman.
If we analyze the womans journey using Lacanian terms that describe a phal-
locentric social system, a unique gure of woman emerges. This woman expands
the borders of her world and establishes a new order within it, thus undermining
the foundations of the patriarchal order. Her three-stage journey constitutes a
new model for creating the feminine identity of a unique woman.
This process is interpreted as beautys journey to release the male beast trapped
and hidden inside her. In the social world she is a placatory woman obeying the
mans gaze, while the beast is repressed and forbidden. In the beasts world she
reveals her desires and her power, and enjoys and gains independence. However
she is also terried by the existence of the beast, so she initiates a transfer to a
48 | The New Psyche: A Model of Different Femininity in Film

world she creates, thereby expressing her complex nature as composed of two
overt, coexisting poles. She is a beauty containing a beast.

Psyche Was a Blonde25

The New Psyche featured in the aforementioned foreign lms is a blonde,
signifying the radicalization of the image of the woman as beautiful. The myth
of the blonde female in the Western world represents a rich complex of images
of femininity (ranging between the poles of purity and sensuality) as seen by the
man.26 The blonde heroines in lms that present different faces of femininity
seek to set themselves free from the bonds of the accepted images of the blonde
(regarded as feminine) and to move toward an existence as individuals.
Belle ( Josette Day), the heroine of Beauty and the Beast, ts the type of the
altruistic woman: She is referred to as angelic but seeks to shake off the image
of the virginal blondethe woman who sacrices herself to save her father and
fulll her familys needsto become a woman who lives with a beloved man.
Similarly Anna (Naomi Watts), the heroine of Eastern Promises, aims to free
herself from the bonds of purity, as a young girl protected by her mother, to
become a mother to a girl she rescues (and later adopts) from the clutches of
the Russian maa. Ann Darrow (Fay Wray)the heroine of King Kong, who
belongs to the female type I categorize as Lolitaalso aims to free herself
from the sexual image of the blonde: She transforms from a sensual, childish
woman into a courageous heroine who saves the city of New York from the
terror of the monstrous Kong.
Similarly Lula (Laura Dern), the heroine of Wild at Heart, is transformed
from a sexy, wild rocker into a mother who brings up her son alone; she struggles
against a criminal mother and her own lover, who is drawn to a life of crime,
and she strives for their mutual love. The dark side of blondes is revealed in
the women I refer to as black swans. Christine (Mary Philbin), the heroine
of The Phantom of the Opera, is an innocent young woman whose attraction
to a dark devil27 transforms her into a famous opera singer and loving woman.
Similarly, the heroine in Yes renounces the safe, bourgeois life and devotes
herself to loving an Arab immigrant worker. These heroines, from both poles
of classic and contemporary lms, shatter the one-dimensional image of the
woman initially represented by the blonde to create a complex, unique gure
made up of conicting images.
 Macabit Abramson | 49

Psyche Was a Brunette: Case Study of Viviane Amsalem

The shattering of the classical Western feminine image may also be recognized in
Viviane Amsalems Mizrahi character. As portrayed by Ronit Elkabetz, Viviane is
a dark woman (black-haired, Jewish, Mizrahi) who shares a common fate with
the mythological Psyche and the blonde cinematic heroines that correspond to
her: She submits to the mans gaze and ts the feminine image, instead of being
free to lead an individual life as a unique human being.
According to Ellen Tremper in her book Im No Angel, the image of feminine
beauty in Western culture has undergone a change, shifting from blondes to the
black-haired models from minority groups.28 Hence the image of the dark woman
portrayed by the Mizrahi Viviane ts the new type, allowing for the shattering
of the homogeneous image of blonde feminine beauty and consequently the
one-dimensional vision of woman. This woman may now be white or black.
One can identify lines of contact between the ancient myth and French,
American, Canadian, British, and Israeli lms. Not only the larger than life
blonde Hollywood heroine but also the realistic Moroccan woman in Israeli
lms t the model of the different femininity of the New Psyche. The case of
Viviane Amsalem, a local gure situated far from and in contrast to the white
Western world, serves as a case study for the status of women. She displays the
universality of the mythological Psyche: the desperate striving for individuality
of the different woman, wherever she may be. Striving, for this woman, signies
life, even if it may lead to her death.
The ancient Psyche renounced social, economic, and emotional security in a
world ruled by men (she left her fathers kingdom, where the people worshiped
her as the epitome of female beauty, as well as Eross pleasure palace and her status
as beloved mistress, the mans pleasure-object) to undertake a tortuous journey to
Hades, seeking independent status, freedom, and recognition. In the same way,
Viviane renounces her status in society as a wife, along with the economic and
social security provided by her husband and society, and chooses an independent
journey of tribulation, at the cost of loneliness and banishment from the family
and society. Like Psyche, Viviane undergoes a journey of feminine individuation
in confronting a man revealed as dark. The conict with her husband reveals
the opposite poles within her. The love relationship between them exposes the
dark side in him and in her, and the inequality in their relationship. She refuses
to continue the relationship with him under these conditions and demands that
he change, thus revealing her unique feminine and moral power. The story of the
50 | The New Psyche: A Model of Different Femininity in Film

relationship between the Mizrahi man and woman corresponds to the myth of
Eros and Psyche, and gives rise to a new process in a world aiming for change.
Hence the trilogy that traces Vivianes character and her desperate actions also
accords with the New Psyche lms, in which the gender conict, the structure
of the narrative, and the characterization of the protagonists create the outline
of a different femininity.
Viviane Amsalem seeks reciprocal and personal love and refuses to accept
the oppressive relationship that her husband, the institution of marriage, and
traditional Jewish society impose on her. However, in contrast to the mythological
Psyche, who attained riches and happiness on Mount Olympus (a loving husband,
a daughter, and the recognition of society), Viviane achieves only freedom and
solitude. The world, as depicted in the movies of Ronit and Shlomi Elkabetz, is
not yet ready to become Mount Olympus and allow reciprocal and egalitarian
relations between the sexes.
Carol Gilligan, in her book The Birth of Pleasure, describes the oppression,
paralysis, and destruction of relationships between men and women in patriarchal
society, in contrast to the egalitarian model proposed by Eros and Psyche: Like
Alice in Wonderland, or more precisely, Alice Through the Looking Glass, Psyche
steps into a world where patriarchy is waning. The celebration of a fair, legal, and
democratic marriage, and a love unthreatened by abandonment, prepares the ground
for the birth of pleasure.29 Gilligan points out the inability of men to talk about
their feelings as being a part of their gender identity; the womans cooperation with
this inability, stemming from a reluctance to destabilize the relationship with the
man, eventually results in a lack of intimacy. Viviane, who will not cooperate with
the inability of her husband, Eliahu (Elisha in Gett; played by Simon Abkarian),
to express his emotions, refuses to live without such intimacy.
Pablo Utin, in reviewing the lm Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem, sees
the source of womens suffering as being integral to the institution of the family
in patriarchal society, especially in Israel, where family life is so revered and
important. He writes: [T]here is another, more basic institution, which the
harsh and disturbing critique of the lm tries to reveal: the rotten institution of
marriage and the family, oppressive and past its time.30
I propose that Vivianes rebellion against the institution of the family in
patriarchal society reects her striving for personal and feminine realization,
which is not only social and economic but mainly spiritual and emotional. From
this point of view, Viviane is a different woman.
 Macabit Abramson | 51

Viviane Amsalems Journey of Individuation

Viviane is married and a mother, from a traditional family, with seven brothers
who press her to remain in her loveless marriage with Eliahu. She provides for
her family, working from home as a hairdresser, and she also cooks the meals
and cares for the children. The sore point in her life is her relationship with her
husband, who hardly speaks to her and does not reveal his feelings; she feels
lonely, suffocated, and unable to solve her relationship with him. He wishes to
hold on to the marriage at any price because of the social status it confers on
him and the traditional values he believes in: his Jewish belief in the sanctity of
the family. Viviane leaves him without divorcing him, and nally, after a long
and debilitating legal process, she obtains the desired divorceonly when she
promises she will renounce all other men.
Viviane pays the heavy price of social isolation. While struggling to obtain the
divorce, she leaves her family to live in a house with another family; she prepares
meals for her husband and children, which she sends to them in the house she
abandoned. When she nally gets the divorce, conditioned on her living alone
and renouncing male company, the terms seem senseless and suicidal, and bring
suffering on her and her family. This outcome will be analyzed according to the
three-stage model of feminine individuation, according to which, through her
relationship with her husband, Viviane becomes aware of her dark side, gains
strength, and refuses to be controlled by it; she instead proposes an original
solution of a different order.

THE SYMBOLIC ORDER

When shown in the world of her family and societyher relationship with
her brothers, her husband, and the surrounding communityViviane is in the
symbolic order: She appears as a submissive and hysterical character, in which
the beast within her is forbidden and suppressed. She reminds one of Belle in
Beauty and the Beast, who was a servant to her sisters in a bourgeois home in a
French village.
Like Belle, who suffered at the hands of her vulgar sisters and a materialistic
and rude provincial social environment, Viviane suffers alienation from her society,
and she seeks a life with a different intellectual and emotional dimension. She is
oppressed by her environment, where she doesnt earn personal recognition from
her husband, her brothers, and the women around her. She is lonely and suffers,
and wants to free herself. She develops a relationship with a lover who suggests
52 | The New Psyche: A Model of Different Femininity in Film

she leave with him, but her commitment to her children wins the day, and she
chooses to remain within the familial jail in obedience to Jewish societys law
of the father.

THE REAL ORDER

On the one hand, Viviane loves her family above all else. She is willing to renounce
her lover for her family. She takes care of her husbands and childrens needs, and
she shares a special warm intimacy with her son. On the other hand, her intense
outbursts of fury and despair when shut away at home, screaming at Eliahu, who
doesnt understand her or respond to her emotional demands, reveal the dark and
suppressed side of her personality. The stormy outbursts of the frustrated Viviane
in confronting her husband in their home express the chaos within her, which
disturbs the order; the chaos lies within the real order, which cannot be expressed
in symbolic terms. Viviane, who seems to be losing her reason, is compared to
a hysterical woman (as described by Paul Verhaeghe, after Freud) who reacts by
physical means when unable to express her suppressed truth directly.31 She also
resembles the masochistic gure whom Freud describes in the essay Femininity.32
Freud claimed that a woman who suppresses her desires suffers from penis
envy and uses her son as a fetish for her self-fulllment, as a substitute for her
absent phallus. With respect to the womans hysteria and masochism, Frances
Restuccia33 and Jessica Benjamin34 write of the woman whose passion nds no
expression in the symbolic order. As Viviane remains in her miserable marriage,
she is a masochistic woman who cannot nd expression for her passion.
In spite of Vivianes frustration and emasculation, her character also reveals
passion and imagination. She has a second world outside her family, represented
by her relationship with her lover in To Take a Wife. This relationship places
her in the real order, analyzed by iek as representing the world of primal,
presymbolic urges.35 With her lover and her fantasy of escape and freedom,
Viviane seems calm, free, and happy for the rst time, in contrast to the suffering
she experienced in her claustrophobic life with her husband and family. She
reminds one of the lead in Yes: Although she is trapped in an oppressive marriage
that has made her sad and lonely, her face is transformed and lled with life and
joy when she is with her Arab lover, experiencing the fulllment of her sexual
urges and emotional intimacy. Like these lm heroines, Belle in Beauty and the
Beast is also transformed from a suffocated character in the world of her family
and villageworking as a servant, with a white kerchief binding her hairinto
 Macabit Abramson | 53

a queen in the Beasts palace, where she wears regal clothes, her thick hair ows
loose, and her voice is free and authoritative.
Viviane loosens her long, thick, black hair as an act of rebellion before the
rabbis in the divorce court. She is thus seen by them as a beast whose behavior
they cannot fathom. Marina Warner, in her book From the Beast to the Blonde,36
describes imagery of hair ranging from the purity of blonde, which represents
submission to the rules of male society, to the beastlike, sensual black hair, which
symbolizes release and sexuality. Hence Vivianes transformation from a modest,
submissive wife, with her hair tied back, into a wild woman with owing black
hair expresses the dark, instinctual side of the good woman.
Vivianes act of leaving her husband without a divorce, related in the lms
Seven Days and Gett, signies the choice to break away from the law of the father;
in this respect it also represents the appearance of the real order in Vivianes
character. She no longer submits to the mans commands, and she refuses to obey
as she had done in the past. Her isolation is characterized by distress and trauma,
which indicates the Lacanian real order, recognizable through her silence and
look of suffering. In her intermediate stage as a woman with no legal status in the
symbolic order, she is outside her traditional society, outside her world, ostracized.
The punishment for a disobedient woman who follows her instincts is likely to
be death, as suggested by Laura Mulvey.37
Viviane chooses to leave her lover and remain with her family; she separates
from her husband, but the divorce is not certain, and her social status is not clear.
She is neither married nor divorced: She does not live with her husband but is
still his wife. Her position expresses her rebellion and situates her in the role of
the beast, resisting societys attempts to bend her to the rules of the male, the
Jewish husband, and God.

MAN-BEAST

Viviane Amsalems husband, Eliahu (Elisha), is an agent of Jewish society and

the symbolic order of the law of the father. He prays in synagogue and refuses to
break up his family. The decrees of the Jewish God, Eliahus instinctual jealousy,
and his belief in his right to ownership of his wife lead him to stick to his refusal
and to freeze the miserable situation for both of them over the course of many
years. He recruits the help of his brother, Vivianes brothers, their wives, and the
judges in the rabbinical court, and they are united in the traditional Mizrahi
belief in the sanctity of the family.
54 | The New Psyche: A Model of Different Femininity in Film

In the trilogy the Jewish husband, portrayed by Simon Abkarian, is depicted

as impotent, inhibited, callous, vengeful, and taciturnunable or unwilling to
express his feelings. In the lm Yes, Abkarian portrays the protagonists Arab
lover: An immigrant worker in London, he is a loving and emotional man who
spouts poetry, makes love, speaks from his heart, dances, and nourishes his
beloved, his married mistress. Despite the inherent differences between the role
of the husband and the role of the lover, and the difference between the secular,
non-Jewish Western society of London and the traditional Mizrahi Jewish society
of Israel, Abkarian in both cases portrays a furious, suffering, underprivileged
man. However, in Yes the Arab man is able to express himself and nd respite in
love, while in the trilogy he silently keeps everything inside himself. The Arab
man in Yes is depicted as a sensual and tempestuous man, representing the other
in society (a foreign immigrant worker and a dark-skinned Muslim in a white
Western world); he can be understood through ieks conceptualization of the
anal father, the jouissant (the beast). One can also consider Eliahu, the agent
of the hegemonic society, as a man who represses his dark side, although this side
of him is revealed when he disregards his wifes suffering, tortures her, and goes
so far as to demand that she abstain from relations with other men as a condition
for granting the divorce. Thus the man who represents the law of the father in
society is depicted at the same time as the dark double of the symbolic father,
who breaks this law to satisfy his unbridled desires.
Eliahus silence, expressed as an inability or unwillingness to speak and share
his inner world with his wife, recalls the silent Phantom in The Phantom of the
Opera. iek analyzes the Phantom as the anal father, dominated by the real:
a mute object, a slave to his desires, who does not utter a sound or perform the
social act of transformation to a subject. The gagged voice is like a bone stuck
in the throat of the object. In ieks view, The voice as an object is precisely
what is stuck in the throatthe thing that cannot be released and thus enter
the dimension of subjectivity [. . .] whereas vocalization as such conrms that the
choice has been made and the subject considers himself part of the community.38
Characterization of the male agent of society as the anal father presents the
Mizrahi Jewish community, and not the woman in the Elkabetz trilogy, as the
beast. This is a society that sacrices the womana pagan society that does not
obey divine monotheistic law. In his article Introduction to the Names of the
Father, Lacan describes the Jewish God and interprets His demand to renounce
jouissance as creating desire.39
 Macabit Abramson | 55

Contrary to Lacans analysis of the name of the father, the Jewish society
represented in these lms resembles that depicted in the lm Dogville (Lars von
Trier, Denmark, 2003),40 in which the symbolic society of the town, manifesting
solidarity and morality, is revealed as dangerousbeastlyin sacricing the
woman to satisfy its desires. In the opening scenes of the rst lm of the trilogy,
To Take a Wife, Vivianes brothers surround her and pressure her to remain mar-
ried against her will. In the third lm, Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem, the
judges look down on her threateningly from their elevated perches and refuse her
request for freedom over the many exhausting years of the trial. The similarity
in the composition of the scenes in these lmspitting a threatening, powerful
male majority against a lone woman in a claustrophobic spacedepicts a male
tribe determined to oppress the woman. This representation is reminiscent of
the balance of power in King Kong, between the monstrous, colossal gorilla and
the tiny woman.
The mythical Psyches fate, as prophesied by the oracle, was to marry the
cruel and deadly dragon. Neumann interprets this as the marriage of deatha
concept expressing the archaic shadow of the marriage ceremony, where the
woman experiences an ancient, primal fear in the face of the conquering mans
instinctive sexuality, which is seen by her as a threatening dragon.41 In the spirit
of this interpretation, Viviane, too, marries a dragon, in her marriage of death
to a man revealed as the anal father who hides behind the mask of agent of the
symbolic society.
She strives to release herself from the jaws of the dragon when she asks for
the divorce, and she succeeds only after she expresses the beast within herself
by not submitting to the pressure and going all out in her struggle against the
male establishment.
In the chapter Why Is Woman a Symptom of Man? iek describes the
womans traumatic encounter with the real, which occurs when the illusion of
the Big Other is revealed in a world that represents the symbolic order of the
law of the father. He interprets abandoning the social reality that bindsto
go for the unknown and the threatening in the real orderas an act of
symbolic suicide: an act of losing everything, of withdrawal from symbolic
reality, that enables us to start again from zeroa point of absolute freedom.
. . . [I]n escaping the reality of the oppressive society, she encounters something
much more terrifyingthe real.42 Viviane performs an act of despair that may
be seen as symbolic suicide when she chooses loneliness, in the vacuum of
56 | The New Psyche: A Model of Different Femininity in Film

the unknown, over her family order. She abandons the life of society and goes
toward the beast.

VIVIANE IN THE BEASTS PALACE

Vivianes dark side (the beast) may be interpreted as representing the jouissant
anal father. According to Paul Verhaeghe in his book Does the Woman Exist?
the hysterical woman is in love with this archaic, suppressed gure, fantasized
as an omnipotent, libidinous man who stands in contrast to the inadequate
man with whom she lives. Verhaeghe also refers to the hysterical womans weak
father,43 who in Vivianes case might be the Jewish society represented by her
husband. According to this interpretation, Viviane, like the hysterical woman,
is ruled by the repressed and forbidden beast when she lives at home with her
family. When she leaves her husband, the beast begins to reveal itself. Vivianes
relationship with another man, her lawyer (Menashe Noy), is only hinted at, and
we have no details of her life in this regard. During the divorce trial Viviane is
mostly reserved (silent, rarely speaks), and only the red blouse she wears to one
of the hearings of the rabbinical court symbolizes her instincts.
The close-up on Viviane emphasizes her role as a sexual object. As Mary-Ann
Doane describes, close-ups of women in lm lay them open to mens gazes, which
here are represented by the husband, the judges, and the witnesses. However,
the close-up also has the opposite effect: It highlights Vivianes unique personal
existence by showing the depths of sadness and emotion in her expression. Her
face lls the screen with its strength; it contrasts with the males judgmental
gaze, which she ignores, instead looking directly at the spectator and forcing
him to see her.44 Her rebellionher unrelenting struggle against her husband,
with her brothers and society backing him; her determination to live alone and
obtain a divorce despite strong opposition and threats, leaving her isolated and
ostracizedis a direct expression of the beast, which pushes her to act according
to her wishes and to fulll them.
During the trial, motivated by despair and her survival instinct (not by
submission, as in her life with her husband, but rather by rebellion against the
social bonds that allowed her husband to own her), Viviane expresses the two
poles of her character. She is the brazen woman (the beast) who does not
renounce her aims despite all the pressures and the exhausting struggle against
her husband; but she is also the gentle, sensitive, and loving woman (beauty),
who is aware of social norms. In contrast to her frustrated, claustrophobic life at
 Macabit Abramson | 57

homeand despite her difcult situationshe does not rant despairingly in the
public domain of the courtroom but instead struggles, assertively and condently,
to free herself from the mens murderous gaze.
Vivianes silence throughout most of the trial indicates her submission to the
male authority. Yet after she lets her hair loose in rebellion against the rabbis, we
see her in a long close-up, accompanied by dramatic music, that perhaps represents
her inner turmoil and expresses a passion the rabbis do not understand and which
has no place in the symbolic order.
She breaks her silence toward the end of the trial, when she describes how
her husband treated her: He always ignored her desires, never asked after her
health or how she feltwhether she was happy or sadnever hugged her, was
unsatised with her cooking, isolated her from her family and friends, always
found a way to sting her and spoil things. She is thus expressing how her desire
for reciprocal love was undermined by her husbands hostile attitude toward her.
Later, when she can no longer bear the courtrooms torture, she rants and
accuses the rabbis of respecting a man who does not respect the law. She accuses
them of being merciless. She curses: To hell with this shitty court! She thus
rejects the male authority, comparing the rabbinical establishment to the anal
father. When she acknowledges the beast, she rejects its control over her; like
Christine, who removes the Phantoms mask, she reveals his distortion, and
refuses to succumb to him.
In her ery monologue following the long silence, Viviane seems to spit out
the bone stuck in her throat, the object of the real, as described by iek. Her
speech expresses the process of forming her subjectivity, when she releases her
voice to the world and pits herself against authority. This agrees with ieks
concept of vocalization as an act of socialization, compared with silence, which
symbolizes enslavement to the real order.45
While the husband remains silent as an object of the real order, the woman
recognizes the real and rejects it. According to this interpretation, during the
course of the trilogy and the trial itself, Viviane goes from being an oppressed,
hysterical woman in whom the male beast is repressed to an independent
woman determined to fulll her wishes; the inner beast is no longer suppressed
but rather transformed into the expression of her personal identity in the world.
The image of the black-haired Mizrahi woman with stormy outbursts of urges
expressed in extreme behavioras she is ruled by her inner nature of the man-
beast to rebel against the symbolic fatherreects her forbidden and suppressed
58 | The New Psyche: A Model of Different Femininity in Film

passion: the feminine passion that expresses her inner self. From this viewpoint one
can claim that the law-breaking anal father is an archetypal image that prompts
the different woman within her to realize her passions and to rebel against the
male-ruled worldnot to rule in his stead, but to build another, more egalitarian
world. In the cinematic portrayals, the archaic male image represents death and
mans enslavement to instinct;46 in this woman, however, it moves her toward the
realization of life and love, through an original feminine outlook of a new order.

LOVE OF THE BEAST

When she accepts her husbands precondition of renouncing other men, Viviane
is seen in the light and he in shadow, like an angel confronting a devil. She is
shown alone, gazing through a lit window, as if at a spiritual vision. The cinematic
scene hints that Eliahu is still the same man-beast, while Viviane has undergone a
change. She acknowledges him, with his instinctive jealousy and possessiveness,
and makes room for him outside herself.
Like Belle, who earns the Beasts condence and is granted the freedom
to leave his palace, Viviane recognizes Eliahus beastliness and is granted her
divorcefreedom from her beast-husband. This is her passage into the imaginary
order, which expresses her personal, feminine, and original outlook.
It thus appears that Viviane is not only a victim of patriarchal societya
traditional oppressed wifebut also a woman whose darkness reects her rebellion
against the oppressive society. When she recognizes the darkness, she, unlike the
man, refuses to bow to its control. She proposes an original alternative through
her feminine outlook on the malea beast she accepts as different from her.
In retrospect one can consider Vivianes relationship with her husband as loving,
as she admits in court when asked why she remained with him for so many years.
The portrayal of Eliahu as a Mizrahi maletall, dark-skinned, ominously silent,
trapped in his loneliness, and a stranger in the worldis that of a man-beast like
Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen), the Russian crime mob driver in Eastern Promises.
Vivianes love for a dark man identies with the male-beast within her, which
she discovers through her relationship with him. In his character the beast is
expressed through an ominous silence, while in hers, through hysterical screams.
When Viviane is freed from the control of the beast and the terror of the
external and internal male through dialogue, she recognizes the distortion in
herself and in the man, in the way she collaborated with him through shouting
and through silence. When she acknowledges the beast and rejects ityet gives
 Macabit Abramson | 59

it space as being separate and different from her by accepting the precondition
for the divorceViviane expresses love for her husband, who releases her because
he believes in her, in the same way the Beast releases Belle from the palace when
he believes in her love for him.
Their mutual declaration of love in the divorce trial concludes with the kiss of
the Beauty and the Beastthe divorce agreement. Thus the darkness in Viviane
is expressed as man-beast: previously repressed but evolving into an original
form of self-expression when she becomes a free woman.

THE IMAGINARY ORDER

In Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem, the third stage in Vivianes journey of
individuation is hinted at, and interpreted as the imaginary order. This term
denotes the personal outlook the woman creates in the world, recognized in
her gaze and voice. In Viviane it nds expression in her initiative to leave her
husband, despite paying the price with her loneliness. In striving for egalitarian
love, which did not exist in her relationship with her husband, she must create
an alternative space to make room for her aims; in the hegemonic society from
which she is escaping, such wishes were not to be recognized. Vivianes society
of origin is based on materialistic values, thus a breadwinning husband who does
not beat his wife is a satisfactory husband. Vivianes quest for an emotionally
satisfying relationship is viewed critically by this society, and not understood;
further, her journey threatens the very foundations of this order. After she
obtains the desired divorce, she is legally accepted by the society but obliged to
create an alternative space for herself. Even after the divorce, she nds herself
in a liminal position that is different from the clear status she held as a married
woman. She is divorced but forbidden to unite with a man. It seems she prefers
this liminal space outside society, which represents her complexity and has no
symbolic representation. She is a female character beyond the law of the father,
outside the symbolic society that cannot categorize her paradoxical identity. Her
character ts with Kaja Silvermans formulation, which sees the creation of the
female subject through opposition to existing verbal constructs that are expressed
by the dominant language.47
Vivianes character also harmonizes with the denition proffered by Teresa
de Lauretis, who wrote of the existence of a feminine subject both inside and
outside the ruling gender ideology, on the margins of communities that create
different lifestyles.48 Viviane, who escapes from the hegemonic center, must
60 | The New Psyche: A Model of Different Femininity in Film

create another space for herself on the margins of society, where she can exist
with feminine subjectivity.

Feminine Passion
The individualistic woman who has a beast within her oats up from the depths of
culture. She is a forbidden gure who wants to live passionately, with her different
and separate identity. She echoes in the tormented character of Viviane, who bears
a powerful, unrestrained, destructive urge, and in those dark women portrayed
by Ronit Elkabetz in earlier lms, such as in the movie The Appointed (Daniel
Wachsmann, Israel, 1990).49 In this lm a strange woman causes re to break out
when she approaches the hero, Shemya (Shuli Rand). Elkabetzs character, Oshra,
is essentially Lilith,50 who poses a threat to the Orthodox Jewish community from
which Shemya ed. Ultimately the community chooses Shemya as their spiritual
leader, isolates him, and forbids him to have relations with this woman. Viviane,
the loving family woman, seems to be the opposite of this dark woman. However
she too threatens traditional society by asking for a divorce. The rabbis, depicted
as having supreme authority in the name of the father, see her as upsetting the
order. Her depiction as a dark woman by the rabbinical establishment, which calls
her a rebellious woman, might suggest that we look differently at the women
portrayed as witches possessing dark, supernatural powers.
Among the dark, extremist female characters, one can also count the poet Yona
Wallach,51 who destroyed sacred cows by connecting religion with sexuality; and
the character of Electra, as portrayed by the black-haired actress Ola Shor-Selectar
in the Cameri Theatre production of the eponymous play.52 Electra rebels against
all rules in the name of family relationships. She murders her mother, who had
murdered her beloved father, and thus banishes herself from society. Viviane
corresponds to these passionate black-haired women but is essentially different
from them. She has an additional dominant pole: She is not only beast, but
also beauty. She is gentle, loving, and moral, which sets her apart from the
dark women who are prepared to go all the way, giving into the urge to isolate
themselves from society. In contrast, Viviane strives to nd a place in the world
where she can live despite her contradictory nature.
Vivianes character provides us with a more complex concept of the woman.
The linking of the actress Ronit Elkabetza strong and powerful woman, with
a denite presence both on and off screenwith the oppressed gure of Viviane
 Macabit Abramson | 61

Amsalem sharpens the duality of this character, who encompasses both erce,
boundary-breaking passion and subservience to rules, family, and society. The plot
of Gett, which unfolds entirely within the courtrooma formal and impersonal
spacemay be seen as a metaphor for the suffocation of and lack of escape for
the trapped heroine, who yearns for a personal relationship and for recognition
of herself and her duality.
The mans dichotomous threatening gazeexpressing a lack of understanding
and empathy, and wishing only to call her to orderconforms to the gaze of
the woman as a witch, as described by Hlne Cixous and Catherine Clment
in their book Newly Born Woman.53 In Carl Theodor Dreyers lm Day of Wrath
(Denmark, 1943),54 the woman, denounced by the Christian religious establishment
as a witch with dark powers, is burned at the stake.
In Luc Bessons lm The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc (France, 1999),55
the priests burn Joan (Milla Jovavich) at the stake because she does not t their
gender denitionsalthough a woman, she wore mens clothes, thus threatening
the hegemonic society ruled by binary categories determined by men. Viviane
was also perceived as a threatening gure by refusing to accede to social pressures
to remain obediently within the social order.
Viviane, who wishes to live as she chooses, shows feminine passion with a
spiritual dimension, as described by Lacan.56 In this view, Viviane, like the witches
mentioned earlier, is sacriced by male society because of her different passion,
which does not t in with the hegemonic codes and the traditional image of the
woman. Her persona is burned alive at the stake when she is allowed to live
alone but without a man or lovethe image of an individualistic woman who
releases her internal beast in her struggle for freedom but has not found a place
where she can live with it unhidden. She prefers to live alone rather than in a
state of alienation, silence, and oppression.

Conclusion
Viviane, the Jewish woman, resembles the ancient Psyche: a princess whose father
sacriced her to a dragon following a prophecy by the oracle, forcing her to
undertake a voyage rife with obstacles through the kingdom of death to fulll her
dream of love. The heroines of the myth and the foreign lms abandon the world
of social oppression and journey to a world of the beast, where they become
aware of their forbidden urges; they eventually refuse the animal pleasures and
62 | The New Psyche: A Model of Different Femininity in Film

establish an alternative, moral world. Viviane undergoes a similar process in the

transition of the different woman from the world of the oppressive society to
the world of the beast. The divorce trial, conducted in the dismal and suffocating
hall of the rabbinical court, reminiscent of the grave, may recall the presymbolic
beasts palace. Her husband, the agent of the society (and king of the palace in this
analogy), is represented as a man-beast. Her recognition of the man-beast within
her occurs through her relationship with him; the rejection of the beast (internal
and external) takes place when she breaks the bonds of silence and acknowledges
it. The happy endingthe kiss of the beast, the agreement with Eliahurepresents
her recognition of the beast and how she sets herself apart from it.
In contrast with other Mizrahi women in Israeli lms, Viviane is not Lilith
(The Appointed), nor a crazy witch (ShChur, Shmuel Hasfari, 1994),57 nor a
traditional woman believing in talismans and card-reading (Obsession; Nissim
Notrika, 2011).58 The Mizrahi women depicted in these lms are wild and passionate,
or moral and oppressed; Viviane is a mix of all of these characteristics. She is a
traditional, family-oriented woman who acknowledges her inner darkness and
forges her own way toward freedom and reciprocal love. She corresponds to the
mythical Psyche, who serves as a model for the universal different woman: one
who follows her feminine passion (the beast) and brings about a breakthrough.
Viviane changes her life when she refuses to succumb to the social pressures to
remain with her husband. She changes from passive to active, and into a feminine
leader who leads away from a materialistic life of untruths. The darkness within
her, which she expresses by breaking through social boundaries, is an expression
of her uniqueness and rebellion against the patriarchyagainst the traditional,
belligerent, Mizrahi society where a woman is considered other, as Simone de
Beauvoir has described.59 However Viviane differs from the image of de Beauvoirs
collective other, and ts in more with the women of the third generation of
feminism, as described by Julia Kristeva in the conclusion of her trilogy on
feminine genius: She is an individualistic woman who fullls her singularity.60
Zivit Gross describes the religious women whose status and the discussion
around it are leading to changes in their society. Gross quotes Tamar Ross: In
fact, if these changes occur, the religious Zionist woman will be considered the
most inuential agent of change in the monotheistic world in general and in the
Jewish world in particular.61 One can perceive the cinematic character of Viviane
Amsalem, who refuses to accept the oppression of women in traditional Mizrahi
society, as initiating such social change.
 Macabit Abramson | 63

The in-depth structure of the female archetype revealed in the analogy

between Psyche and Viviane indicates that, more than being simply a traditional
Mizrahi woman, Viviane Amsalem is an individual woman. Her hidden image
breaks through the trilogy, when in the end she prefers to live in limbo rather
than under repression and impotence. This situation might force a woman like
her to invent a place for herself, thus expanding the borders of society to include
herthe different woman: the beauty who contains a beast.62 The echo of
the ancient myth in foreign and Israeli lms is critical of the present world, in
which there is as yet no place for the model of femininity (blonde or brunette)
represented by the New Psyche.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Macabit Abramson is a cinema researcher whose doctoral thesis focused on analyzing
representations of the myth of Eros and Psyche in classic and postmodern lms as
well as proposing a new identity model for a different femininity. Abramson is a
director, producer, and scriptwriter of documentary, ctional, and experimental lms,
and also lectures on cinema at Sapir Academic College. Macabit12@gmail.com

Notes
1. Erich Neumann, Amor and Psyche: The Psychic Development of the Feminine, trans.
Yoram Bronowsky and Miriam Ron-Bechar (Tel Aviv: Sifriat Poalim, 1990), 534.
[Hebrew]
2. To Take a Wife (distributed by Sanger Films and Transfax Films) features Ronit
Elkabetz and Simon Abkarian.
3. Seven Days (distributed by July-August Productions, Yehoshua Rabinowitz Fund for
the Arts, YES, and KESHET) features Ronit Elkabetz and Simon Abkarian.
4. Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem (distributed by Yehoshua Rabinowitz Fund for the
Arts) features Ronit Elkabetz and Simon Abkarian.
5. The blonde women in lm represent various images of femininity in Western culture,
as claimed by various researchers, among them Joanna Pitman. See Joanna Pitman, On
Blondes (London: Bloomsbury, 2003), 34.
6. Selvoj iek, following Freud and Lacan, introduced the character of the primordial
father. He sees him as the anal father, shadowing the Oedipal father, the agent of
64 | The New Psyche: A Model of Different Femininity in Film

society and paternal law, led by boundless desires and rejecting the laws of society:
Consequently, the crucial point is that the anal father is the hedonistic father [. . .],
not the agent of symbolic law. See Selvoj iek, Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan
Inside Hollywood and Out, trans. Ronni Yador (Tel Aviv: Maariv Books, 2004), 137.
[Hebrew]
7. Neumann, Amor and Psyche, 3435.
8. Ibid., 39112.
9. Macabit Abramson, The New Psyche in Movies: Journey against a Dark Man, PhD
diss., Tel Aviv University, 2015. [Hebrew].
10. Marina Warner sees the myth of Eros and Psyche as the original version of Beauty and
the Beast. See Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their
Tellers (London: Chatto & Windus), 1994), 273.
11. La Belle et la Bte (Beauty and the Beast; distributed by DisCina), features Jean Marais
and Josette Day.
12. King Kong (distributed by RKO Radio Pictures) features Fay Wray and Robert
Armstrong.
13. The Phantom of the Opera (distributed by Universal Films) features Lon Chaney and
Mary Philbin.
14. Eastern Promises (distributed by Focus Films) features Naomi Watts and Viggo
Mortensen.
15. Yes (distributed by Sony Films) features Joan Allen and Simon Abkarian.
16. Wild at Heart (distributed by PolyGram Filmed Entertainment, Propaganda Films)
features Laura Dern and Nicolas Cage.
17. Florida Scott-Maxwell, in her Jungian reading of the female gender, presents conicts
between masculinity and femininity in the same way as I discuss them. See Florida
Scott-Maxwell, Women and Sometimes Men (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1957), 29.
18. See Pitman, On Blondes.
19. The methodology of interdisciplinary cultural research also corresponds with Orit
Kamirs approach, when she proposes combining a legal model, feminist analysis,
biblical text, and modern lm. See Orit Kamir, A Law and Film Analysis of the Book
of Ruth and the Film Antonias Line, Alei Mishpat Law Review 8 (2010): 55132.
20. Analysis of the female characters in myth and the lms that correspond to it (while
examining the unique female attributes of both genres) follows the research model
proposed by Julia Kristeva, as set out in the introduction to her trilogy, Hannah
Arendt (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 921. Kristeva studies female
uniqueness through writing about three unique women: political-philosophical
 Macabit Abramson | 65

theorist Hannah Arendt, psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, and writer and actress Colette.
She aims to present the individuality of their characters through an analysis of their
biographies and creative works, thus clarifying the nature of the feminine genius, as
she calls it, that distinguishes, characterizes, and connects them to one another.
21. Analysis of the Lacanian orders is according to Dylan Evanss interpretation. See
Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, trans. Debbie
Eylon, ed. Ruth Golan (Tel Aviv: Resling, 2005). [Hebrew]
22. Jacques Lacan, The Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real, in On the Names of the
Father, trans. Noam Baruch, ed. Marco Mauas (Tel Aviv: Resling, 2006), 4750.
[Hebrew]
23. iek, Enjoy Your Symptom!
24. According to Lacan the desire is unconscious and sexual, located in the real; as
such it is the goal of psychoanalytic processto recognize the truth of the desire. See
Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, 41.
25. This is my paraphrase and interpretation of the link between the myth of the blonde
and the myth of feminine beauty that Psyche, considered the most beautiful woman in
the world, represents.
26. Ellen Tremper describes the range of female images in the blonde female category
as ranging from sweet and innocent princess to frigid vampire woman. See Ellen
Tremper, Im No Angel: The Blonde in Fiction and Film (Charlottesville: University of
Virginia Press, 2006), 220225.
27. In The Phantom of the Opera Christine appears on stage in the scene of an opera as a girl
with fair plaits who is attracted to the devil, thus representing herself.
28. See Tremper, Im No Angel, 232.
29. Carol Gilligan, The Birth of Pleasure, trans. Daria Shoali (Tel Aviv: Yediot Ahronot,
Sifrey Hemed, 2006), 188. [Hebrew]
30. Pablo Utin, Analysis of the Viviane Trilogy of Ronit and Shlomi Elkabetz (To Take a
Wife, Seven Days, and Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem), Srita (cinema blog), 2014,
srita.net/2014/10/03/vivianne_trilogy, accessed June 29, 2015. [Hebrew]
31. Paul Verhaeghe, Does the Woman Exist? From Freuds Hysteric to Lacans Feminine
(London: Rebus Press, 1999), 29.
32. Sigmund Freud, Femininity, in Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. Arieh Baer, ed.
H. Ormian (Or Yehuda: Kineret, Zmora-Bitan Dvir, 2009), 267286.
33. Frances L. Restuccia, Amorous Acts: Lacanian Ethics in Modernism, Film, and Queer
Theory (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 82.
34. Jessica Benjamin, The Alienation of Desire: Womens Masochism and Ideal Love,
66 | The New Psyche: A Model of Different Femininity in Film

in Essential Papers on the Psychology of Women, ed. Claudia Zanardi (New York: New
York University Press, 1990), 457.
35. iek, Enjoy Your Symptom! 3637.
36. Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde, 354386.
37. Laura Mulvey, Afterthoughts on Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema Inspired by
King Vidors Duel in the Sun, in Feminist Film Theory: A Reader, ed. Sue Thornham
(New York: New York University Press, 1999), 122130.
38. iek, Enjoy Your Symptom! 130.
39. Lacan, Introduction to the Names of the Father, in On the Names of the Father,
104167.
40. Dogville (distributed by Zentropa Entertainments) features Nicole Kidman and Paul
Bettany.
41. Neumann, Amor and Psyche.
42. iek, Enjoy Your Symptom! 55.
43. Verhaeghe, Does the Woman Exist? 2930.
44. Mary-Ann Doane, Veiling over Desire: Close-ups of the Woman, in Femmes Fatales:
Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1991), 4475. Doane
proposes that the close-up is intended for the others (the spectators) gaze. Through
it the woman is revealed not only as an object of gazing, but as herself, her cinematic
entity, which increases the yearning for her and intensies the spectators attitude
toward her and his possession of her. This approach enables us to view Viviane as the
desirable woman in the lm and to see the suppressed sexual element in her character
in contrast to other women: obedience and traditional femininity on the one hand,
existing simultaneously with emotions, suppressed urges, and individuality on the
other.
45. iek, Enjoy Your Symptom! 130.
46. As the husband is portrayed in these lms, and as depicted as a beast in the foreign
lms discussed earlier.
47. Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988).
48. Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 26.
49. The Appointed (distributed by 21st Century Film Corporation) features David Danino,
Shuli Rand, and Ronit Elkabetz.
50. A demonic female character in Jewish mythology who represents the antithesis of the
good married woman.
 Macabit Abramson | 67

51. Her historical character was portrayed cinematically in the lm Yona, directed by Nir
Bergman (distributed by Akim United, Ltd., 2015), and featuring Naomi Levov.
52. Electra (by Sophocles), performed by the Cameri Theatre of Tel Aviv and directed by
Kr Azoulay, 2015.
53. Hlne Cixous and Catherine Clment, Newly Born Woman, trans. Hila Kras, ed.
Karola Hilfrich (Tel Aviv: Resling, 2006), 1617. [Hebrew]
54. Day of Wrath (distributed by Palladium Productions) features Preben Lerdorff Rye.
55. The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc (distributed by Gaumont Okko Production)
features Milla Jovovich and John Malkovich.
56. Itzhak Benyamini analyzes Lacans twentieth seminar, More, which he claims is
about superuous pleasuring for women, describing it as mystical ecstasy related to
connection with the heavenly other. See Itzhak Benyamini, Lacans Discourse: The
Revision of Psychoanalysis and Judeo-Christian Ethics (Tel Aviv: Resling, 2009), 392.
[Hebrew]
57. ShChur (distributed by Meckberg Media Group Movie Entertainment) features Gila
Almagor and Ronit Elkabetz.
58. Obsession (distributed by Riki Shelah Hafakot) features Reymonde Amsallem and
Yehezkel Lazarov.
59. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Sharon Preminger (Tel Aviv: Bavel, 2001).
[Hebrew]
60. Julia Kristeva, Colette (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 403427.
61. Zivit Gross, The Vanishing Female Culture among Graduates of the National-
Religious Educational System in Israel, Tarbut Demokratit 10 (2006): 107. [Hebrew]
62. The different woman who is not included in any category in the hegemonic language
may be compared to the unidentiable animal, like the blue-green creature in Franz
Kafkas story In Our Synagogue. Viviane is the different woman in the traditional
society. See Franz Kafka, In Our Synagogue, trans. Dan Miron, Haaretz, April 8,
2009, www.haaretz.co.il/literature/1.1254947, accessed June 29, 2015.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without
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