Lost Angels Psychoanalysis and Cinema

Re-reading Freud's writing on femininity, fantasy and social identification, Lost Angels expands the psychoanalytic framework within which contemporary debates regarding fantasy and spectatorship have been taking place. Vicky Lebeau takes Freud's preoccupation with femininity and feminine fantasy as her starting point and goes on to explore his differentiation between masculine and feminine forms of fantasy through feminist and critical theories of spectatorship and cinema. Investigating how psychoanalysis explains fantasy as a form of preoccupation which cuts across both 'private' and 'public' forms of fantasy, Lebeau links discussion of the female spectator with the so-called 'malaise' of today's mass culture through her close readings of three key 'youth' films of the 1980's - John Hughes' Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Francis Coppola's Rumble Fish and Tim Hunter's River's Edge. Lost Angels is a ground-breading addition to current feminist film theory and essential reading for all students of film.

1. Introduction 2. Daddy's cinema: femininity and mass spectatorship 3. Femininity, fantasy and the collective 4 Rumble Fish : Francis Coppola, Susan Hinton and Narcissus 5. Lost Angels: River's Edge and social spectatorship 6. Afterword `beyond all shadow of doubt' Notes Bibliography

Vicky Lebeau has published widely in the fields of psychoanalysis and visual culture. She has particular interests in the topics of sexuality, fantasy and representation. In psychoanalysis, she has particular interests in Freud, Winnicott, Andre Green, Jean Laplanche, Serge Leclaire, Michael Eigen, Joyce McDougall and Christopher Bollas; interests in 19th and 20th century writers and film-makers include George Eliot, Doris Lessing, Elfriede Jelinek, Michael Haneke.