_The Vanishing_: Knowledge, Guilt, & Sex/Gender/Sexuality

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

George Sluizer's _The Vanishing_ works with the problematic of knowledge,
guilt, & sex/gender/sexuality. It is a story of the triangulation of
desire--the desire to possess knowledge, which is coded as both guilty and
sexual knowledge--staged through two men and one woman. (The coding of
desire as desire for knowledge, and that of knowledge as guilty and sexual,
are of course the staples of pornography, non-Marxist Western philosophy,
and Christianity.)

The crux of the story is doubled: Saskia's disappearance (that is, her
abduction by Raymond); and Raymond's invitation to Saskia's lover Rex to
'experience exactly what Saskia experienced, from the point of the
kidnapping on.' And Rex accepts his invitation, which leads to his
'vanishing' and death.

In other words, for a man to (desire to) know what a woman knows (that is,
to become the Object of Man) leads to his destruction, or so says _The
Vanishing_, in its misogyny and homophobia. Maybe the film is a riff on
Sartre's _Being and Nothingness_ (e.g. "My original fall is the existence
of the Other" and "It is before the Other that I am _guilty_. I am guilty
first when beneath the Other's look I experience my alienation and my
nakedness as a fall from grace which I must assume. This is the meaning of
the famous line from Scripture: 'They knew that they were naked.'..."),
meant to be analyzed through Eve Sedgwick's _Between Men_, Lacan, and Zizek
(to tarry with the invalid problematic of 'common sense').

Yoshie