Abstract

In today’s highly sexualized visual culture, the young girl as object of desire has become ubiquitous, resulting in a decidedly questionable and problematic fantasy of femininity. In this context, the following paper aims to question the fantasy of girlhood as it is conveyed by certain contemporary popular films, while at the same time approaching the topic from the perspective of contemporary Lacanian film studies. As such, focus is drawn on the theoretical standpoints offered by Slavoj Žižek, as well as by Joan Copjec, Elizabeth Cowie and Todd McGowan, all of whom approach film and its gaze not as a tool of objectification and mastery, but as an objet a. Fantasy is therefore presented as the veil that conceals a repressed desire that emerges through the perverted gaze implied by the young girl.Upon demonstrating the pertinence of present-day Lacanian film theory in the study of the aforementioned fantasy, an analysis of Sam Mendes’ American Beauty problematizes this very fantasy and its hidden, traumatic kernel. The ultimate aim is to determine how a certain cinema attempts to defy the mainstream ideology of sexualization by showing that which the symbolic cannot explain, namely the young girl as object of desire, and as a contemporary, inverted and perverted form of Oedipal fantasy. In so doing, it will be shown how this type of film demonstrates cinema’s potential in triggering reflections on complex social and cultural phenomena