Elisabeth Bronfen

The ideological content of this home romance can be summarized in the following manner. The place of abode, in which one can make oneself feel comfortable, is the product of our fantasy work; one, however, which is defined by the values of the cultural background informing us. In the mythic signifier ‘home’, personal fantasy work comes to be crossed with collective fantasy work. At the same time, however, home is always, to a degree, a nostalgically oriented materialization of the sense of comfort and belonging. If one recalls Sigmund Freud’s definition of the family romance, it becomes clear why fantasy scenarios revolving around cultural constructions of home, have come to take on such paradigmatic, and indeed resilient, character. For the safe home, the loving parents, the first objects of desire are the images our imaginary negotiation and refiguration of reality continues to have recourse to, so as to allow us to produce coherent and meaningful stories by which to live our everyday existence, fraught as the latter is with contingencies and discontent. Yet this place of happiness, of unlimited and uncurtailed enjoyment, of wealth and safety never actually existed. The point Freud makes about the family romance in general is that it involves a belated positive re-evaluation, allowing us to live with everyday unhappiness - with the fissure inevitably inscribed in happiness, be it in relation to one’ s family, the place of birth, or the objects one desires. If one takes the message transmitted by Hollywood cinema seriously, home, thus, emerges as a paradigmatic example for the way ideology inscribes the imaginary relationship we entertain towards our real living conditions. Although we find no entry for home in Roland Barthes’ discussion of myths of everyday culture, it functions precisely in the way he argues the mythic signifier does. For it translates the facticity of human existence into a safe sign, taming and domesticating the disturbance that emerges from historical and geo-cultural particularity. The process of translating reality into mythic signification works, thus Barthes’ claim, by transposing historically specific conditions of living into universal, essential, and thus allegedly ‘natural’ values, and in so doing turning opaque cultural signs into signs of transparency. Apodictically put, the wager subtending my own discussion of the places of abode and familiarity Hollywood has brought into circulation since the mid-twentieth century, is that home does not exist, even while one can fruitfully come to inhabit the ideological construct of it. It is worth bearing in mind that the statement ‘There’s no place like home’ is semantically ambiguous. On the figural level it means, no place is as familiar to us, and implicitly as pleasurable and safe to us, as the place we come from. But on the literal level the statement declares that home does not exist as a place; there is no place to which the label ‘home’ actually corresponds. This, however, is precisely what the resilient afterlife - to invoke Aby Warburg’s notion of the pathos formula - of The Wizard of Oz, proves, for we have come to enjoy this film explicitly as ideology pure. We know that this film is a cinematic enactment of the fact that a satisfied existence in our real living conditions requires the mediation of our imaginary processes; namely the fictions that allow us to believe that the relationship we entertain towards our lived reality isn’t contingent, isn’t accidental, isn’t arbitrary, but rather highly meaningful, indeed fateful, at least in the sense that it is necessary, unavoidable and inescapable. Yet what I find particularly compelling about the resilient survival of Fleming’s musical is the fact that the citation works in the many films in which references are made to The Wizard of Oz, because we, as movie-goers, share an imaginary world. We recognize the references. They arouse in us the feeling of familiarity. Speaking about the construction of home in Hollywood cinema, one might say, pertains to an emotional situation in which we speak or sing along to give voice to a sense of familiarity, even though, or precisely because we can not articulate the emotions we attribute to this place of abode in any rational manner. As Gaston Bachelard has argued, 'Not only our memories, but the things we have forgotten are ‘housed.’ Our soul is an abode. And by remembering ‘ houses’ and ‘ rooms,’ we learn to ‘ abide’ within ourself...the home images move in both directions: they are in us as much as we are in them [Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space. The Classic Look at how we Experience Intimate Places. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), p. xxxvi]. Applying this to cinema, I would want to add, films that have taken on the status of a mutually shared imaginary geography, are one of the most resilient examples for the way in which the analogy between leaving to live in places and learning to abide within ourselves has come to be played through culturally.