A Study on THE REAL in Asghar Farhadi's Movies Based on Slavoj Zizek's Ideas

In spite of many studies have been conducted on Asghar Farhadi’s works, there is still no reliable study in terms of psychoanalytic. The purpose of this research is to identify one of three rings of Jacques Lacan’s Borromean Knot (The real) in Farhadi’s movies based on contemporary Slavoj Žižek’s psychoanalytic ideas. The Borromean Knot is a group of three rings which are linked in such a way that if any one of them is cut, all three become separated. Lacan used the Borromean Knot as a way of illustrating the interdependence of three orders of the real, the symbolic and the imaginary. Unlike our conventional conception of objective/collective experience, in Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, the real is something which resists representation. It is pre-mirror, pre-imaginary, presymbolic and cannot be symbolized through language. In other word, language cannot be considered as a means of illustrating it. In fact, man experiences this difficulty during his life and touches the horrible side of the Real through those points where symbolization fails, for example through trauma and aversion. Lacan also used the term ‘little object a’ (objet petit a) to refer to what is inaccessible in the object of desire and he replaced the familiar subjectobject dichotomy from epistemology with a new dichotomy that expresses the relation between the ‘barred’ or ‘split’ subject and the objet petit a, as the enigmatic, ‘real’ element in the object of desire. Slavoj Žižek explained this psychoanalytic term in relation to Alfred Hitchcock’s MacGuffin. In this paper, “The real” in Farhadi’s movies has been analyzed through descriptive–analytic method. “About Elli” (2009), “Separation” (2011), and “The Past” (2013) are the movies which have been selected to analyze in this paper. We focused on the real in Farhadi’s movies in the forms of the absence of champion, interference of fantasies and cynicism. In psychoanalytic studies, cynicism manifests itself as a general or specific attitude, characterized by frustration, hopelessness and disillusionment. We have analyzed three mentioned movies as three separated but interrelated works, or in other words as a trilogy and the results shows that many factors in these three movies, for instance, sharing characters’ fault, represent characters as victim, and diminishing the active contribution of Spectator from “About Elly” to “The Past”, bold the painful and inevitable aspect of the real and hide its horrible side.