The vigilante fantasy in Last Seen Alive (2022)
The movie Last Seen Alive (2022) can be read through the psychoanalytical lense of fantasy. I think the movie, while not being a great work of art proves to very short-circuit into the fantasy space of contemporary right-wing policies. It is also ‘post-fascist’ in the sense that it’s right-wing ideology turns around the vigilante figure rather than the brown-shirt mass movement. It is the vigilante as self-made man, as totally independent that matters. While vigilantes might occasionally work in groups, the group identity, contrary to traditional fascism is only contemporary. The vigilante, while taking its roots back in history only really gains its significance in the contemporary consumer capitalist universe.
When we approach a film like this maybe the best entry is simply to remember Freud’s dictum, that in a dream all characters represent the dreamer himself. That is to say, what looks like a terrifying opponent that the dreamer wants to get rid off, is a disawoved aspect of the dreamer himself. In the movie this clearly goes for “Frank”, the obscene drug-lord that has kidnapped Will’s wife Lisa. Frank is not some other person, but precisely the aspect of Will that wants to enact violence and rape on his own wife. The figure represents the “illicit” enjoyment that Will unconsciously wants to engage in. The fantasy structure therefore depicts Will’s fight against Frank, which enables him both to enact violence beyond the law, and therefore illicit enjoyment, but also to present the overcoming. of this aspect and troubling excess, so that by the end of the movie, we see Will and Lisa united and laughing together (Lisa asking Will to say with her).
Let us recall the initial premise of the movie. Lisa and Will have trouble in their marriage. Lisa has been having an affair, with a man called “Clint” and Will has been trying to ‘understand’ her. We see in the beginning Will saying that he forgives her and we get the sense of ‘tough’ man, that however is going out of his way to try to understand Lisa’s affair. We can say, that this is precisely the contemporary conservatives ‘masculinist’ position. Women refuses to be in their traditional roles of house-wives. Lisa, although Will has given her a ‘good life’ (a big house, boat and so on), has been working a lot. The movie, therefore plays with Freud’s question of ‘was will das Weib’ (what does woman want?). Lisa, from Will’s perspetive, presents a desire, that cannot be pinned down to the traditional role of a house-wife. The movie, in masculinist ideology, then tries to figure out what to do with this desire (her enigmatic relation to Clint). The movie clearly depicts her affair with Clint as a result of Will’s neglect: in other words, the movie can only see feminine desire arising as a result of a man’s neglect. It is also plays on traditional male misogyny (‘you can never know what a woman want, her words can never be trusted). Will tries, in the flash backs we see, to communicate clearly, but Lisa cannot say what she wants. In other words, a feminine desire is inherently treacherous and deceiving, and the movie is basically about how to, in an ideological way, to manage anew (in our new post-patriarchal world) a way for the new man to be. The movie is of course extremely reactionary, but it is precisely reactionary. What we get is not the old paternalistic figure, but a masculinity created from the vacuum left by the 1968-movements and overcoming of old bureacratic and paternalistic structures.
After the initial encounter in the car, Will and Lisa, on the way to her parents, are stopping at a gas station. Lisa goes in to buy some water, but on the way out is hailed by a man. We see how she is hesitant, but probably because of her ‘good nature’, decides to help him. A truck pulls up, and next thing we know Lisa is gone. The movie therefore gives us clear signs that Lisa has been abducted and puts our identification with Will who immediately sets out to look for her. Whereas everyone else tells him to calm down and distrusts his stories that she wouldn’t go off, he alone seem to have the right suspicion. Since the movie has shown the viewer the event leading up to Lisa’s disappearance, it clearly puts us on the side of Will. The movie, for a Gerard Butler-movie is, more sophisticated than usually in the cutting of camera. We see Will walking around looking for a long time, but cut through hard cuts, which gives us the sense of a “hopeless” search and helps build frustration that puts us in Will’s shoes. When he calls the police, they are extremely reluctant, and even when they asks the man working at the gas station if he has any video footage he says it’s not working. The police simply believes him, whereas Will quickly discovers, simply by looking at the cameras outside by the car that they are working. This gives us, very importantly the sense, that the law is impotent. This is what justifies Will’s later path of violent retribution. If the law would simply be working (if the policeman Paterson would have seen the cameras working which is the minimum you could expect from a law enforcer, he would have seen that Oscar, the man working at the gas station, was lying). What this means is however, that this enables Will’s excessive enjoyment in the violence. if the law would simply be working, there would be no reason for Will to go on his own violent path to get her back.
The movie similarly very effectively in terms of form indicate this frustration. After Lisa is gone no one trusts Will. In real time very little time goes by, but because of the cutting (Will going in his car on the high way, driving back and forth), we have the sense that a long time goes by, that Will is caught in a claustrophobic world of mistrust (Lisa’s parents are slow-witted and don’t trust him), so, Will and us the viewers get more and more frustrated. The proof of this is that when Will finally takes matters into his own hands, no matter your pacifistic character, you are relieved: finally an attempt to break out of this claustrophobic massive prohibition. We have the sense, that Will is the only one who is not allowed to enjoy, while everyone else is enjoying in their stupidity (lazy police and stupid parents), or in violent trangressions (Oscar and the mechanic Knuckles that kidnaps Lisa). It is also only because Will takes a lot of photos that Knuckles can even be identified as the one that has kidnapped Lisa, which would never have been discovered otherwise, by the slow police. it is also only because of Will that they even have the footage, since Oscar has lied, so it is only when Will calls his bluff (because he puts 2 and 2 together from the cameras working and Oscar’s lie) and when goes behind the counter, fights Oscar and wins easily, that he gets the footage.
Let us now put it in lacanian terms of fantasy. as Todd Mcgowan has written, fantasy involves three aspects, to simplify. It is a scenario that establishes the subject, the object desired and then the obstacle that prevents the attainment of the object. We can only desire what is unattainable. If we would simply get things easily, we would not be able to enjoy them through their near-impossibility. In McGowan’s example, if I am a high-school student, I might dream of getting into Harvard. This object is desirable because it is so difficult. The local community college is not, because it is attainable. I might say, that it is because of the career that awaits me after Harvard, but first of all it is the unattainability that attracts my desire. Contrary to what we might think it is not Harvard itself, but its “impossibility” that makes us desire Harvard. It is the hardest most difficult to get into:
“This is why, when I’m in high school, I fantasize about going to Harvard rather than about going to the local community college. The difficulty of getting into Harvard — or even the impossibility, given my academic acumen — plays the key role in the enjoyment that the fantasy provides. If everyone easily got into Harvard, I would not waste my time fantasizing about it. For this reason, teens don’t fantasize about getting into the local community college. Harvard’s admission standards function as the implicit obstacle in the fantasy that provides the source of the enjoyment that the fantasy offers” (Todd McGowan. “The Racist Fantasy (Psychoanalytic Horizons).”).
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This is why for psychoanalysis we always tend to focus on the obstacle. We think, as a high-school student, that we simply want to overcome the obstacle and get into Harvard, but the obstacle is the most important part. The only significance of the object is that it is unattainable. Now, how does this work in Last Seen Alive as ‘neo-masculinist’ fantasy? Will is the subject and Lisa is the object of desire. Yet, Will can only really ‘enjoy’ her when there is an obstacle, when she is kidnapped by Knucles and the drug-gang. While the conscious motif is of course to ‘get her back’, this obstacle provides the entire enjoyment of the film. We feel (and Will feels) a pleasure in the end when he is back with Lisa, but this is short-lived and only possible on the background of the previous excessive enjoyment. Enjoyment is, as psychoanalysis teaches us, different from pleasure. pleasure is like comfort, whereas enjoyment is always troubling, always excesssive. Franks drug-lab that Will goes to to look for Lisa is a place of enjoyment, people doing meth, random orgies, guns. Enjoyment is pleasure but taken to the point of pain.
To take McGowan’s example: we only enjoy Harvard through the obstacle, that makes the “enjoyment” also painful (I am not in Harvard now, but if I study all the time…), which means that the fantasy of Harvard is pleasure mixed with pain of the moment, of the work. Will can also ‘enjoy’ Lisa, precisely as she is supposedly being raped if he does not rescue her in time. The thought of what the men like Knucles and Frank might do to her is painful for Will, but it is also enjoyable for that very reason, it goes “beyond pleasure”.
The obstacle, here Frank’s kidnapping, is therefore absolutely essential to how we can desire the the object. The fantasy structure gives us the path to the object by overcoming enjoyment (like Will shooting up Frank and his bodyguards and blowing up the whole drug-lab). It provides us with present lack (Will without Lisa, chasing her), but also with a scenario where we overcome this lack. This necessity of the obstacle is also a great contributor to the film. Whenever Will overcomes one obstacle, like finding Knucles and beating him up and gettting him to tell where Lisa might be, another obstacle occurs. If Lisa was simply in Knuckle’s house, the obstacle would already be over and there would be no film, which is to say no real enjoyment. It would be, in Mcgowan’s example, as if you could get in to Harvard by just studying for a few weeks. In the film the obstacles are also the police, the parents.
What psychoanalysis does, in terms of analysand (not patient, since it is the person in analysis that himself does the analysing), is to bring them to see the necessity of the obstacle for enjoying and the necessity of lack. Were we without lack, we would be suffocated. We therefore should not simply fantasize about overcoming lack. But ‘traverse’ the fantasy, which means reconcile ourselves with lack. This does not mean that we have to accept things the way they are, since reconciling ourselves with lack already changes them.
One of the most interesting things in the film in terms of our current political predicament is the way that it, despite our call to enjoyment (everyone is supposed to enjoy) shows us that this is very difficult. We cannot enjoy without excess. In the movie it therefore shows us a kind of enjoyment sans entraves which is the drug-lab and the vigilante’s purpose is to ‘clean’ or purge society of this enjoyment. This enjoyment is always transgressive, since enjoyment as such is transgressive. The movie thereby legitimizes Will’s transgression (using violence, shooting people, blowing up an entire drug lab, driving like crazy on the highway) as a response to another transgression. In the racist fantasy, this is always the case: the immigrant is ‘illegal’, that is does not succumb to the law and this legitimizes the vigilantes excessive violence. While the movie of course depicts our frustration with slow police and bureacrazy, this is the only way to legitimize Will’s violence (because without this violence Lisa would not be rescued). To put it another way, Lisa is not the object cause of desire, but simply an object that serves as a foil, so we can engage in the excessive acts, like Will’s blowing up the drug-lab. This is also why the movie is right wing: it shows any kind of communal livinng as transgressive enjoyment, as only possible as kind of heroin or meth-like universe, where people are zombies (Frank’s druglab). This lab is off the grid, phones do not work there. It is therefore also a place where Will can go to excesses, where he paradoxically can ‘be free’, although this is only unconscios, consciously he thinks he is just saving Lisa. The movie cleverly contrasts spaces in this way: the druglab is communal, there are no clear borders, no clear possesions, whereas the flashbacks to Will’s own house is like the american dream of possesion and materialism in the common sense understanding of the term (big house, boat, car, making big sales as a real estate agent, which is Will’s occupation). In other words, the spaces of Knuckles’ house and Frank’s community contrasts sharply with the neoliberal universe of the self-made man of Will, who can have his own property and possession (including Lisa as a possession).
The movie is a right-wing fantasy in that it shows the need for excessive enjoyment: Frank, in order to combat and ‘purge it’. The paradox is that without Frank’s druglab there would be nothing to enjoy and Will would then need another obstacle. The movie of course ends with the fantasy of the union of the couple, as though this would be possible, to simply enjoy without pain, but this is also why the end only takes a few minutes. Here, paterson, the black police officers comes Will and says, they discovered that not everybody in the druglab died of the explosion. Paterson lets Will know between the lines that he knows Will shot a lot of people but also that he is impressed (he shakes Will’s hand with a an impressed nod of the head). What we get here is the typical logic of the law and its obscene underside (violence sustaining it). This is also what we see when paterson, more and more on Will’s side in the movie, beats up Knuckles at one point. We therefore as spectators get to enjoy police violence and approve of it, because only in this way can we get to Lisa’s rescue. It is a significant Freudian displacement that the police violence is carried out by black man on Knuckles who looks like the typical ‘aesthetic’ look of Trump supporter (unkept beard, balding, unhygienic). The movie could not of course never show white police officers beating up a black man, since this is ‘too close to reality’ of contemporary american society, part of its obscene underside. What it does is however precisely through displacement (black officer beating up Trump supporter) makes us sympathize with police violence as the ‘necessary’ transgression since law in itself is not enough. It must be ‘backed’ up by men (like Will and Patterson) who can beyond the ‘letter of the law’ and beat up bad guys. What the movie therefore, in right-wing ideology testifies to, is that it’s ok for police to beat up people, since it is part of the necessity of keeping up the law that ‘liberals’ do not want to see. In this way, we more or less are made to approve of the actual police violence in contemporary society, as ‘not everything can be shown to the public’.
What is new is of course not simply police violence, but also a new trend among right-wingers of showing the ‘necessity’ of transgression. Compared to earlier, where such transgressions had to be kept out of sight, they are now more and more brought into the spotlight, as the ‘dirty truth’ we have to accept. This is the same with for example Putin or some of his associates, Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov who was ‘gifted’ prisoners of war by his 16 year old son. The point here is why is this shown, which before would operate as dirty secret among the soldiers to give them coherence and unity (participating in shared transgression) is now openly communicated to the public.
part of this new right wing, is simply as Slavoj Zizek had said, the obscene freedom of ‘you may’. It is not that postmodernism gives us a ‘risk society’ with too many choices, but that, as we see with Will it gives us many. choices but a complicated set of rules in how to go about these choices (don’t beat up people, don’t be a racist, don’t be sexist). That is all the things that the movie outsources to Frank’s community, where enjoyment is really without ‘responsibility’. The problem with enjoyment in today’s neoliberal universe is that we are commanded to enjoy, but at the same time without its excessivenesss. The problem is that enjoyment is always excessive, so we are trapped like Will in the constant claustrophobic situation of not being able to ‘enjoy’, but also commanded to do it. This is part of the obscene relief we feel when Paterson and Will beat up people. This means that the vigilante also shows us a new figure of the master: the master is no longer the postmodern master, that does not want to be a master, but more like Putin, Trump or Bolsanaro, an obscene master that says: you may! (like to the Russian soldiers, you may rape, kill, torture…). It is a ‘licence’ to enjoy without responsibility. Yet, this cannot be assumed consciously: but needs the detour as a response (we only torture because terrorist are trying to destroy America). Will only shoots people because they might rape his wife etc. This is what gives the licence to transgressive enjoyment.
This new right-wing is however like Will a vigilante-right. It is not like Goebells brown-shirts that command uniformity (everyone should wear the brown shirt etc.). It is rather only possible as an individualized endeavour, a kind of Do-it-yourself fascism. We see this also in the various “storming of the congress” (U.S., Brazil), where the ‘aesthetics’ of people is extremely varied. It is not the old fascism of uniformity, but precisely a carnival of enjoyment (they are closer to Frank’s drug-lab, than to the classical fascist marches). That is why this new right also constantly endeavours to embrace, the strong ‘male’ as an entrepeneur. Not someone who is really following a ‘paternal’ figure (although this was also not really the case with classical fascism, Hitler is not a paternal figure, but a hysterical replacement of him), but instead a kind of ‘group’ of equals, the “alpha-male”. It is therefore a fascism totally mediated through late consumer capitalism. It is not even an attempt, as fascism as an ‘alternative modernity’, but much more a reaction to the paradox of the commandment to enjoy.
