The allegory of the cave and its displacements in Room: image, maternal function and accession to the reality principle
Keywords:
allegory of the cave, Plato, psychoanalysis and cinema, constitution of the self, reality principleAbstract
This essay examines how the allegory of the cave, set out by Plato in book VII of The Republic, operates as a reading key for the film Room (2015), directed by Lenny Abrahamson from Emma Donoghue's novel of the same name. It argues that the correspondence between the two works is not exhausted by the situational resemblance between captivity and the underground prison, and that its theoretical interest lies precisely where the analogy shifts. Three such displacements are identified and developed: the inversion of the status of the image, since in the film it is the televisual simulacrum that receives the index of unreality while the place of captivity is affirmed as world; the presence, absent in Plato, of a maternal function that is at once captive and institutor of the world the child inhabits; and the conversion of the exit into a psychic passage, legible in Freudian terms as the accession to the reality principle and as mourning. It concludes that the allegory remains operative as a theory of the reorientation of the gaze, yet requires psychoanalytic concepts concerning the constitution of the self in dependence on the other.
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