“There is a family knowledge that sometimes allows a fault to be disguised. It is extremely valuable because on the other hand, there are families that due to their internal economy, so to speak, can, on the contrary, be extremely crime-promoting, not necessarily willingly, but because they open up the crack” [1].
This is precisely what the series La Mesías by the duo Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, worthy heirs of Almodóvar, bears witness to. The formal inventiveness of the two filmmakers sets the scene for a gruesome family drama with a kitschy aesthetic, full of pop religiosity.We follow the journey of a mother and her children over several decades. In the early years, the mother, who is entirely caught-up in the whirlwind of her own jouissance and convinced of her brilliant future, struggles to take care of her two children, who live in the wake of her chaos. Her life takes a radical turn when she meets an Opus Dei fanatic who is as enigmatic as he is disturbing. He drives her to the very worst by triggering within her a mystical delirium imbued with fanaticism. Thence, they will form a cloistered family, cut off from the outside world. The couple’s many children, prisoners of this oppressive universe, live under the thumb of these two uncompromising adults. Only the two eldest children, who were not born from this union, manage to extricate themselves from this family, which they end up rejecting completely. However, nothing indicates that they have extricated themselves from their position as objects of their mother. The series clearly demonstrates that distancing oneself from or rejecting one’s family does not necessarily testify to an extraction of jouissance engendering a subjective constitution that allows for “the handling of the object of fantasy and liberates the jouissance attached to the object α beyond the phallus, for a jouissance of life” [2]. Distancing oneself or separating from one’s family is not necessarily rejecting it.
Rejection carries with it a radical dimension related to the culture of the superego, as Philippe Giovanelli emphasizes in his orientation text, that I invite you to discover in this newsletter. Under the theme of Family and its Discontents, this text highlights the variations of rejection.In so doing, it opens a series of paths that elicit the desire to take the theme a little further.
In La Mesías, family madness captivates, fascinates and horrifies! Francesca Biagi-Chai follows a very different approach, analyzing it and offering us a text, a real ethical and clinical compass, that will guide the blog section.
The constant flashbacks at the heart of the series’ narrative, form a complex puzzle that reflects the effects of family madness on children. But let’s not forget that behind the relationships with the father and mother lie the relationships that the subject establishes with jouissance, knowledge and the object α. This is what Pascal Docquiert’s contribution, stemming from the epistemic morning of PIPOL 12 held in Brussels last November, teaches us.
[1] Francesca Biagi-Chai, “Les crimes en série”, La Cause freudienne, no. 69 (September 2008): 137.
[2] Christiane Alberti, “Désir de famille”, Mental, no. 44 (December 2021): 22.
Translation : Polina Agapaki
Proofreading : Robyn Adler