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Image And Illusion Create False Mastery
- The imaginary links ego to an image and also to illusion, creating a false sense of mastery over a fragmented body or world.
- This double meaning (image + illusory mastery) explains why film and mirrors so powerfully shape subjectivity.
Cinema Trains Us To Fill In Gaps
- Cinema exemplifies the imaginary by offering slices of a whole world and relying on spectators to fill in gaps between cuts.
- That filling-in is the same imaginary operation that produces everyday coherence, not just filmic illusion.
1970s Film Theory Misread The Imaginary
- Critical film theory in the 1970s centered the imaginary and treated spectatorship as mirroring mastery, which simplified psychoanalytic claims.
- That reading ignored the imaginary's core status as an illusory investment that repeatedly breaks down under the real.