This review of the collection of articles directed by Sébastien Dupont and Hugues Paris emphasizes the adolescent girl’s aspect of evanescence, as it has been explored and exploited by contemporary cinema. The adolescent girl appears to be an expression of what eludes total understanding. The different figures of the adolescent girls, exhibited by the cinematic work, attest to an effect of diffraction which is linked to the experience of drives imposed on the subject.
By analyzing Michael Jackson’s « Thriller » video, we offer a discussion of adolescent metamorphosis. Through an extraordinary self-fiction linking cinematic reference to myth and science fiction, Jackson shows, with a radical and transgressive postmodern gesture, the ridiculousness of such oppositions as man-woman, angel-demon, human-animal, living-dead, reality-fiction – mere pairings whose structuring power he shatters. What can one say about a body primary function seems to be go from one transformation to another, to keep metamorphosizing into harrowing new extremes, in order to replay the metamorphosis of adolescence, which is here marked by a tragic negativity?
Adolescence, 2013, T. 31, n°4, pp. 965-977.
Revue semestrielle de psychanalyse, psychopathologie et sciences humaines, indexée AERES au listing PsycINFO publiée avec le concours du Centre National du Livre et de l’Université de Paris Diderot Paris 7