This kind of self-conceptualization based upon the characters’ perceptions of “the other” and the illusion of “self” represents a constant re-performance of Lacan’s mirror stage of development and stunts the characters' ultimate evolution into fully integrated individual personalities. Neither man is capable, on his own, of perceiving or accepting himself as a genuine and individual entity autonomous from “the other”, and so both characters constantly struggle with the concept of a genuine self. Both men settle for illusory “mirror” selves rather than acknowledging or creating a true sense of personal identity. The mirrored image of each man is only an illusion of a cohesive persona, and as long as both remain fixated on that illusion, they are unable to evolve a sense of genuine selfhood to supplant the superficial identity which the mirror provides. These men constantly return to the mirror, the other, the “face”, in order to define themselves because they are unable to let go of their pleasing and comforting illusions.
Leonard Zelig, the prota
gonist and titular character of Woody Allen’s film Zelig, is a chameleon, a man who takes on the identities of those surrounding him, even replicating their appearance in his own body. He is a true everyman, an ANYman. Zelig has seen the mirror, and that mirror is other people; that mirror is he. Leonard is incapable of perceiving only himself in the mirror, and instead fixates on reflecting the “reflections” of others. He is constantly changing, adapting to his surroundings and creating illusory selves which merely mimic the superficial identities of those around him. The man defines himself only in relation to others, and subsumes any shred of “Leonard” to the assumption of the “selves” of others. As Richard Feldstein puts it in his essay “The Dissolution of the Self in Zelig,” “this narcissistic tendency of seeing the other as a simulacrum indissociable from the self is a malady that leads to an endless reduplification from which Zelig’s hybrid self is constituted. Consequently, Leonard discounts himself and takes the ego of the other as the locus of truth” (157). Essentially, Leonard Zelig is stuck in the mirror stage, looking to others, to external reflections of identity, to see himself. His inability to detach his appreciation of himself from his conception of others results in a series of dramatic chameleon-like shifts; Leonard’s identity is superficial and transitory, shifting with every new face that crosses his mirror. Leonard’s mirror is the world, and he is too caught up in putting on camouflage personas to become a complete and individual “self”. Leonard does not know himself, or is dissatisfied with the image of himself which he has seen, and so he sucks in and assimilates the external identities of others.Tellingly, when Zelig is not faced with “the mirror”, when he is alone, he is “devoid of personality, his human qualities long since lost in the shuffle of life, he sits . . . staring into space, a cipher, a non person, a performing freak. He who only wanted to fit in, to belong, to go unseen by his enemies and be loved, neither fits in nor belongs.” Because he is so caught up in replicating the identities of others to mask or protect what little genuine “Zelig” identity exists, Leonard becomes essentially empty in the absence of others to reflect. In a way, Leonard Zelig is a void, an empty shell desperately in search of an identity, ANY identity to either fill him or at least mask his emptiness, a kind of personality vacuum. In the early stages of the film, Leonard’s psychologist, Eudora Fletcher, puts Leonard into a hypnotic state and asks him about his motives in changing:
EUDORA. Now tell me why you assume the characteristics of the person you’re
with.
LEONARD. It’s safe.
EUDORA. What do you mean, what do you mean ‘safe’?
LEONARD. Safe to be like the others.
EUDORA. You want to be safe?
LEONARD. I want to be liked.
Leonard’s transformations are, in effect, a kind of extreme social self-defense mechanism, meant to shield Zelig from either the absence of, or general inferiority of, his own genuine self, a cloaking mechanism he has cultivated in order to blend and protect himself from social scrutiny. Moreover, he also assimilates the identities of others in order to endear himself to them, making him both a completely agreeable partner and the living embodiment of the old adage that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Zelig has quite literally constructed the “face to meet the faces,” by assimilating the very literal faces of those he meets. In mirroring those he observes surrounding him, he becomes both friend and mirror while simultaneously using his companion as a mirror upon which to construct his “self.” This behavior stems from Zelig’s stunted evolution of personal identity. As a child, Zelig was abused, and frequently beaten by his peers and undervalued, and perhaps even loathed, by his own parents. In describing Leonard’s childhood, the film’s narrator proclaims that “as a boy, Leonard is frequently bullied by anti-Semites. His parents, who never take his part and blame him for everything, side with the anti-Semites.” Obviously this has had a destructive influence on Leonard’s identity. He has been taught to devalue what little individual sense of self he has, and to sublimate his own personality to those of others, changing not only his appearance and behavior, but his entire belief system as well. Just as his parents made the illogical ideological shift to agree with anti-Semites in degrading Leonard, so he makes frequent ideological shifts to accommodate the politics of those who cross his “mirror,” at one point speaking at the same party as an upper crust Republican within a crowd of the upper class Republicans, only to retreat to the kitchen and wax poetic on the Democratic party amongst the servants, and later even joins the Nazi party in order to get a sense of belonging after the American culture rejects him.
The Nazi incident is perhaps one of the most significant shifts in Zelig’s life throughout the film, because it represents the biggest ideological shift, and a certain amount of self-loathing, out of any of Zelig’s other “faces.” Leonard Zelig is Jewish, and so naturally there is a certain amount of very significant self-loathing and denial in Leonard’s assumption of a Nazi identity. Just like his parents before him, Leonard takes on the ideology of his staunchest opponents, declared haters of Jews and Judaism, identifying and aligning himself with the anti-Semites, and becoming a potentially active participant in the aggressive and very real destruction of a significant part of himself. Religion is one of the major sources of both individual and group identity, and so this mirroring of German soldiers represents a significant betrayal of what little personal identity Zelig may be said to have, both a cultural and an almost biological rejection.
Of course, this particular act of identity assumption is also significant because it comes as a result of Zelig’s rejection as a cultural icon by the American press and the American populace. After Eudora has cured, and fallen in love with, Zelig, the pair enjoy a brief, shining moment as media darlings. Zelig is able to both be himself and be well liked, and so he is therefore safe to be himself, a self he has developed, significantly, not through any act of his own, but through the guidance of Eudora. So, in a sense, it could be argued that even at this point, Zelig may not be genuinely himself, but merely a reflection of the “Zelig face” Eudora wishes him to be. Either way, however, Zelig enters into a period where it is safe to maintain a stable identity, and ceases to shift, ceases to mirror those around him. At this point, he seems to have successfully passed through his constant cycle of “mirror stages” and reached a genuine understanding for some value of self. Unfortunately, this period cannot last, and America turns on Zelig as women begin to come forward, claiming to have wed him and borne children by him. This begins a period of scape-goating of a truly epic scale, during which Leonard is accused of bigamy, adultery, and a bad house-painting job, amongst ot
her things. As the film is quick to point out, the American public is fickle, “glutted with distractions,” and equally willing to vilify Zelig’s newly consolidated self as it was to aggrandize him. In rejecting Zelig’s “genuine” self identity, American media effectively shatters Zelig’s mirror, breaking him out of the cohesive and individual whole self-reflection he has constructed and back into a fractured reflection of everyone surrounding him. So, it becomes again unsafe for Zelig to be “Zelig,” and he is unable to merely be himself and remain liked and accepted, so he fractures again and disappears, ultimately resurfacing amongst the Nazis. This is an act not only of aggression against himself, but also against the nation that has rejected him, as the Nazis and America will ultimately dissolve into bloody war against each other. Once again, Zelig has fallen back into being a void of identity, assuming the personas, appearances and ideologies of those around him so that he doesn’t have to come to terms with himself.In contrast to Leonard Zelig, Patrick Bateman, the central figure of the film American Psycho, is an aggressive and violent pathological narcissist, rather than simply an identity vacuum. He exhibits a “grandiose sense of self importance or uniqueness and preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success and power; hypersensitivity to criticism; and a lack of empathy”, and has an all consuming need for attention and validation, success and infamy (Post 100). However, it is important to note that despite this narcissistic self-obsession, Bateman does not perceive his idol, himself, as a genuine entity, saying of himself that:
There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman; some kind of abstraction. But there is no real me: only an entity, something illusory. And though I can hide my cold gaze, and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable... I simply am not there.
It is interesting to consider that as Patrick speaks these lines, he is facing a bathroom mirror, peeling off a cosmetic face mask. Patrick is suggesting that his entire being is a series of masks, of performances, and that he defines himself both literally and figuratively by these appearances, rather than any genuine, substantial individual conception of “self.” He is quite literally cultivating the “face to meet the faces”. Bateman casts all of his own actions and appearances as façade, as illusion, and in a way, even his narcissism can be read as an illusion, a performance rather than a reality, since Bateman himself believes there is no real Bateman over whom to obsess. Therefore, narcissistic obsession presents a strange dichotomy in Bateman, in that he is simultaneously obsessed with himself and convinced of his own non existence and irrelevance as an individual.
Much like Zelig, Bateman creates his false selves based upon external influences, constructing temporary identities supported and inspired by his own perception of the “other”. However, unlike Zelig, Bateman appears from the first to be completely aware of this. It is immensely ironic that, as he discusses his own lack of a genuine identity, Bateman literally enacts Jacques Lacan’s “mirror stage” of development, a theoretical stage during which, according to J. Laplanche, upon observing themselves in a mirror for the first time, a child “sees an invented image and falsely takes this reflection as the first illustration of a unified concept” (qtd. in Feldstein 155). As he describes his own lack of genuine identity, Bateman is actively “inventing” a cohesive image of himself through the mirror, fully acknowledging his own awareness of the falseness of this self-identity. Bateman creates himself as the ideal (or at least, what he perceives as the ideal, which ideal is ironically the theoretical product of the mirror stage): the perfect rat in the race for yuppie success, meticulously maintaining his appearance and ferociously competing with the other rats in business suits for the prestige of being the best and brightest, the holder of the most tasteful business card, the name on the reservation at the best restaurant, and the beau of the most attractive woman. This creation and acquisitiveness is informed by Bateman’s perception of those around him and his observation of yuppie culture, rather than any genuine desire on his part for the things themselves. Further, Bateman does not believe in the individual, and so he is constantly assembling the “face” to mask his own identity void, and in classic narcissistic fashion, he conflates his own lack of genuine identity with the same lack in others, se
eing others “as extensions of the self, who are there only to supply admiration and gratification” (Post 103). This refusal to acknowledge others as beings separate from himself allows him to murder without any compunction, as he doesn’t see others as any more “real” than he. At one point, Patrick even goes so far as to take on the identity of one of his victims, Paul Allen. Patrick himself is all façade, and he believes others to be equally illusory and empty, so assuming the murdered man’s identity is no different than putting on any of the other “faces” Bateman has created for himself. No one is real to Bateman, including himself, and so he sees no compelling reason, even self-preservation, to curb his murderous inclinations.Ultimately, neither Zelig nor Bateman has a clear and real idea of self, and so both become nothing more than a collection of social masks. Neither man completes the mirror stage of their development, nor does either of them have a clear conception of the self as a complete and individual entity, truly independent of others. However, this unachieved realization of identity is itself based upon an illusion, the appearance of the self in the mirror, rather than a genuine complex self-conceptualization. In a way, it could be argued that no one truly overcomes this problematic oasis view of identity: in some small way, most people remain concerned with appearances and social convention to the detriment of genuine self-expression and identification. The true self remains an unachieved, and unachievable, ideal. It is all too easy for those already struggling to find a genuine individual identity to simply acquire a mask of social acceptability to conceal their own emptiness, as Leonard Zelig and Patrick Bateman do. When the self is utterly subsumed to these external social cues, void personalities, like Zelig and Bateman, become the blank slate upon which more acceptable “faces” are hung. Granted, both of these men take on these masks for arguably very different reasons, but it is worthwhile to note that both take on these illusory identities as a means of protecting and concealing themselves. Neither man can comfortably confront their genuine self within the confines of society, and so Zelig buries his true self, while Bateman denies his own genuine existence altogether, becoming nothing beyond or beneath the many masks he creates for himself.
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Works Cited
American Psycho. Dir. Mary Harron. Perf. Christian Bale. Lions Gate, 2000. DVD.
Eliot, T.S. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Paul Lauter. Vol. D. Boston: Wadsworth, 2006. 1583-6. Print. 5 vols.
Feldstein, Richard. “The Dissolution of the Self in Zelig”. Literature and Film Quarterly 13.3 (1985):155-60. Print.
Post, Jerrold M. “Current Concepts of the Narcissistic Personality: Implications for Political Psychology.” Political Psychology 14.1 (Mar. 1993): 99-121. JSTOR. Web. 23 Mar. 2010.
Zelig. Dir. Woody Allen. Perf. Woody Allen, Mia Farrow. MGM, 1983. DVD.
Works Cited
American Psycho. Dir. Mary Harron. Perf. Christian Bale. Lions Gate, 2000. DVD.
Eliot, T.S. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Paul Lauter. Vol. D. Boston: Wadsworth, 2006. 1583-6. Print. 5 vols.
Feldstein, Richard. “The Dissolution of the Self in Zelig”. Literature and Film Quarterly 13.3 (1985):155-60. Print.
Post, Jerrold M. “Current Concepts of the Narcissistic Personality: Implications for Political Psychology.” Political Psychology 14.1 (Mar. 1993): 99-121. JSTOR. Web. 23 Mar. 2010.
Zelig. Dir. Woody Allen. Perf. Woody Allen, Mia Farrow. MGM, 1983. DVD.
