The Desire Logic Of Lou Ye's Films

Lou Ye is one of the Chinese directors who maintains his own style of filming hitherto. As the leading role of the sixth generation directors in China, he is not only famous for his unique and stylized image expression, but also for his precise thinking and visualized narration of the current, changeable society.After an overview of his films, we can see that the points of "body", "identity" and "space" have always been mainly talked and manifested through his creation path. This paper will make the western theory of psychoanalysis interact with Lou Ye's films to discover the secrets and answers of the problems of "body", "identity" and "space" in the light of Lacan's "desire" theory. This paper selects three different works of Lou Ye-<The Summer Palace>, <Suzhou River>,<Massage> for analysis.Lacan's theories are complicated and confused to some extend, but they provide us with a kind of calm and objective point of view to look at the growth of a person/individual with ultimate comprehension. This paper aims at decoding the constructions of characters in the three films with Lacan's theories. All of the three works are following the modes of Lacan's views. Multiple relationships of mirror images exist among the characters or characters and space. The stories continue decently on the base that all the characters are surviving with inner deficiencies and consequently what happens next is that all of them are thirsty for completion as they desire. After they experience the process of his imaginary/symbolic identification of others and end up finishing writing the allegory successfully/unsuccessfully, finally they have to start a new journey again to write another new allegory.From Lacan's perspective, all of the characters in Lou Ye's films are searching for completion as desire drives. But it is a necessity that the deficiency of desire leads the characters to seek identification with "the other" for satisfaction. The characters interact with the world for the precondition that they are deficient of desire and try to communicate with the world through their own bodies instead of language. Body turns out to be an instrument to satisfy desire. The "mirror" alienates the subject when subject is on the way to get identification with "the other" due to the identification is an illusion. And "space" has become the signifier of disciplines and power, it is the presence of "the Other". All the characters try to get identification to "the Other" in order to become the real "ego". However, "the Other" continually humiliates the subject for disruption or making them become the real "ego". After all, we finally code the secrets that hide behind the "body", "identity" and "space" of all characters in Lou Ye's films with which help to fully understand the rationality of them.