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Introduction

“...The concept of the suture attempts to account for the means by which subjects emerge within discourse”
Miller: “that moment when the subject inserts itself into the symbolic register in the guise of a signifier, and in so doing gains meaning at the expense of being”
Lacan: process by which the subject comes to find a place for itself in a signifying chain by inserting itself in what is perceived as a gap, a place-holder for it.

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Introduction Cont...

Lack and absence
fort/da (gone/back) game as inauguration into language
“A given signifier (a pronoun, a personal name) grants the subject access to the symbolic order, but alienates it not only from its own needs but from its drives. That signifier stands in for the absent subject (i.e. absent in being) whose lack it can never stop signifying” (219).
Suture tries to answer the questions:

Subject Position

Films are articulated and the viewing subject spoken by means of interlocking shots
“Shot relationships are seen as the equivalent of syntactic ones in linguistic discourse, as the agency whereby meaning emerges and a subject-position is constructed for the viewer” (220).
Shot/Reverse Shot
Maltese Falcon, Psycho conversation, Psycho shower scene
“Classic film text must at all costs conceal from the viewing subject the passivity of that subject’s position, and this necessitates denying the fact that there is any reality outside the fiction” (221).

Subject’s Willingness

“A gaze within the fiction serves to conceal the controlling gaze outside the fiction; a benign other steps in and obscures the presence of the coercive and castrating Other. In other words, the subject of the speech passes itself off as the speaking subject” (221).
“The classic cinematic organization depends upon the subject’s willingness to become absent to itself by permitting a fictional character to ‘stand in’ for it, or by allowing a particular point of view to define what it sees” (222).
“The operation of suture is successful at the moment that the viewing subject says, “Yes, that’s me,” or “That’s what I see” (222).

The Cut and Signifying Ensembles

“The cut guarantees that both the preceding and the subsequent shots will function as structuring absences to the present shot. These absences make possible a signifying ensemble, convert one shot into a signifier of the next one, and the signified of the preceding one” (222).
“Thus cinematic coherence and plentitude emerge through multiple cuts and negations. Each image is defined through its differences from those that surround it syntagmatically and those it paradigmatically implies (‘this but not that’), as well as through its denial of any discourse but its own” (222).
“...Repudiation of alternative discourses is one of the chief aims of the system of suture”

Psycho

There are abrupt identification shifts in Psycho
“These abrupt shifts would seem to thwart the process of identification...However, quite the reverse holds true. The more intense the threat of castration and loss, the more intense the viewing subject’s desire for narrative closure” (223).
Opening shot of Psycho has no reverse shot to anchor that spectacle to a fictional gaze…
Money has transcendental gaze… (non-diegetic)
What sutures us after Marion’s death is the fear being cut off from narrative

Psycho and Suture

“What Psycho obliges us to understand is that we want suture so badly that we’ll take it at any price, even with the fullest knowledge of what it entails - passive insertions into preexisting discursive positions (both mythically potent and mythically impotent); threatened losses and false recoveries; and subordination to the castrating gaze of a symbolic Other” (227).
“...the more the operations of enunciation are revealed to the viewing subject, the more tenacious is its desire for the comfort and closure of narrative - the more anxious it will be to seek refuge within the film’s fiction. In so doing, the viewing subject submits to cinematic signification, permits itself to be spoken by the film’s discourse. For the theoreticians of suture, the viewing subject thereby reenacts its entry into the symbolic order…” (227-228).

Orthodox Ideology

Match of subject and cinematic discourse occurs not just at the level of the shot but at that of the story
Suture functions not only constantly to reinterpellate the viewing subject into the same discursive positions, thereby giving that subject the illusion of a stable and continuous identity, but to rearticulate the existing symbolic order in ideologically orthodox ways