Recently I wrote an essay on Jacques Lacan and The Who's Tommy. What an easy post to make!
The version I have saved and the version I have turned in are slightly different but you can still tell I'm kind of a dork.
Lacan’s Mirror Stage and the Who’s Tommy
In Jacques Lacan’s theories, the “Mirror Stage” marks the creation of an imaginary identity as your coherent, whole self. A baby, at around six months, sees itself in a mirror and is able to point to herself and separate herself from the Other – she forms an identity separate from “The Real,” or the baby blob that’s part of the bigger meaningless universe gunk, and will enter “The Imaginary,” where she’s able to see herself as whole and coherent. The mirror stage is usually reinforced, according to Lacan, by the mother, who will point at the image and affirm it with something like, “yes, that’s you,” or something even more identity-fixing, such as, “look, you’re such a pretty girl.” She will spend the rest of her life forming and trying to achieve this wholeness and coherency, or her “Ideal-I.” This “Ideal-I” will start to move beyond just the idea of imaginary wholeness and coherency as seen in the mirror, and start snowballing, picking up images from surrounding people and images, for example, her parents, or favorite television shows, or Seventeen. The baby, then the child, teenager, and adult, will anticipate achieving this “Ideal-I,” but will, deep down, know that really, she is messy and fragmented, just like everything and everyone else. This will haunt her for the rest of her life.
In The Who’s rock opera Tommy, the protagonist, Tommy, loses his ability for language when he witnesses, depending on whether you’re listening to the album or watching the film, respectively, either his father (who was previously presumed dead in World War One) killing his mother’s lover or his mother’s lover killing his father (for purposes of this essay, I’ll assume the album story). Even at a young age, he realizes he needs to suppress this memory in order to not break up his family. As a result he becomes, to the world, blind, deaf and dumb, although one can infer it’s all psychosomatic from, first of all, the trigger being his mother telling him he didn’t see anything, and second, his fascination with mirrors. However, when not looking in a mirror, he doesn’t perceive anything through sight or sound, and has no use of language. Once one leaves “The Real,” one cannot return, and at five years old, Tommy would have been past the Mirror Stage for at least four years. But from Tommy’s fascination of mirrors and lack of language, one can assume that Tommy, after witnessing his father’s murder, regressed as far back as he could go without reuniting with The Real, and became perpetually stuck in the Mirror Stage.
What’s most notable about Tommy’s regression, from a Lacanian standpoint, is his lack of language. According to Lacan, you lose the Real when you enter into language. Tommy, having already entered into language before becoming dumb, could not retreat entirely back to the Real; rather, he’s haunted by it, and is probably constantly staring in the mirror for fear of disappearing. Tommy has less moved more toward the Real as much as he’s completely rejected the Symbolic, which is the structure of language itself. The Symbolic and the Imaginary overlap somewhat, but mostly, the Symbolic is marked by becoming a speaking subject, or fully being able to articulate yourself as an “I,” and others as symbols. With a lack of comprehension of symbols, his blindness and deafness is less literal, physical blindness and deafness as much as having no conceptualization of signifiers. When he cannot separate himself from his mother, or a pinball machine, or his father, he’s left fumbling around in a world of inseparable gunk, but with the demands and identity that come along with moving away from the Real. Lacan says that language is always identified by lack; you don’t need language in the Real because the Real is all fullness. Therefore, Tommy has started to feel lack, but has no way to demand, or even articulate, what he needs.
His family, having already gone through Lacan’s stages of development, is concerned for Tommy’s lack of passage through them. Lacan discusses that part of fixing your identity into your “Ideal-I” is fixing your desires and feelings, e.g., fixing your gratitude toward your secretary into Administrative Professionals Week. In “Christmas,” Tommy’s mother and father have learned to fix their religious desires through one holiday, and use Christmas as an excuse to be concerned about Tommy’s lack of ability to accept Jesus, and therefore his entry into Heaven: “But Tommy doesn’t know what day it is/He doesn’t know who Jesus was or what praying is/How can he be saved/from the eternal grave?” Theoretically, Tommy could grab at a Christmas tree and notice there are pine needles in the house, and have that trigger a memory of Christmas from, say, age four. But with a lack of even the most basic symbols, he can’t move onto the more advanced parts of the Symbolic, like fixing desires as part of turning the imaginary self into an “impenetrable armor.” As a last-ditch effort, Tommy’s father takes him to a lady of the night to make him grow up – as part of the deal, she gives him hallucinogenic drugs, saying, “your boy won’t be a boy no more/young but not a child.” By Lacan’s definitions of adulthood, this would mean he would settle into the Symbolic. But alas, this doesn’t work. Tommy continues starting at mirrors and his parents give up, until Tommy discovers pinball.
Being deaf, blind and dumb, Tommy’s success at pinball makes him an overnight celebrity. He collects disciples and corporate sponsorship, which Tommy, having no sense of the symbolic to recognize these followers as an Other, doesn’t really notice. His parents, however, having stepped into the world of materialism long ago, do. As a result, his family becomes very wealthy, and Tommy gets a medical specialist who says he can “cure” Tommy. He can’t, exactly. But Tommy’s suppressed subconscious reaches out to them in “See Me/Feel Me,” which speaks to Lacan’s dislike of repression. In “Smash the Mirror,” Tommy is eventually “cured” when his mother smashes a mirror he’s staring into in her frustration, since he pays so much attention to the mirror and none to her. In the usual Mirror Phase, the mother reinforces the Imaginary by pointing at the image that isn’t actually the baby, just an image, and affirming it. Tommy experiences a reversal of the Mirror Stage, in that his mother rejects Tommy’s imaginary self.
Ironically, at this point, Tommy becomes a cult figure, and his “enlightenment” contributes strongly to others’ senses of “Ideal-I,” i.e., he becomes a mirror himself. Tommy, no longer needing a mirror or having a fear of disappearing, appeals to the masses desiring a fortress, or an unbreakable sense of whole, complete self, particularly Sally Simpson, who sneaks out of her house to see one of his “sermons,” only to be thrown from the stage by security, getting a gash on her face. This could be symbolic of the fear of breaking or disappearing when you don’t have your whole, imaginary “Ideal-I” in sight.
Tommy asks his followers to deafen, blind and mute themselves to gain spiritual enlightenment – presumably, to eliminate their use of symbols and enter the Real, which eventually proves to be impossible for the masses. Eventually, after having been exploited by Tommy’s family and associates who seek commercial gain, Tommy’s followers reject him in the song “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” in an ultimate testament to the permanence of the Symbolic phase.
Tommy, however, achieves a new level of spiritual enlightenment after being abandoned by his disciples, which I take to be a sense of the Real while still having the Symbolic. “Right behind you/I see the millions/On you/I get opinions/From you/I get the story” could be a declaration of fragmented individuality inside the unified blob in a way Lacan wouldn’t think was even possible.
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ALSO NOTABLE: that is Ann-Margaret who had a semi-successful pop music career in the early 60's, but afterwards has mostly been in a lot of musicals, e.g., Tommy, Newsies.
