According to Lacan, the mirror stage occurs in infants between six and eighteen months of age, when they misrecognize themselves while looking in the mirror. The infant's look in the mirror is a misrecognition because the infant sees its fragmentary body as a whole and identifies itself with this illusory unity. In the process, the infant assumes a mastery over the body that it does not have, and this self-deception forms the basis for the development of the infant's ego. By detailing the formation of the ego through an imaginary process, Lacan thereby undermines the substantial status that the ego has in some versions of psychoanalysis (especially American ego psychology, often the target of Lacan's most vituperative attacks). The attractiveness of this idea for film theory is readily apparent if we can accept the analogy between Lacan's infant and the cinematic spectator.
Mirror Stage in Film Theory
Psychoanalytic film theorists such as Christian Metz took this analogy as their point of departure. For them, the film screen serves as a mirror through which the spectator can identify himself or herself as a coherent and omnipotent ego.
The sense of power that spectatorship provides derives from the spectator's primary identification with the camera itself. Though the spectator is in actual fact a passive (and even impotent) viewer of the action on the screen, identification with the camera provides the spectator with an illusion of unmitigated power over the screen images. Within the filmic discourse, the camera knows no limit: it goes everywhere, sees everyone, exposes everything. The technological nature of the filmic medium (unlike, say, the novel) prevents a film from capturing absence. The camera inaugurates a regime of visibility from which nothing escapes, and this complete visibility allows spectators to believe themselves to be all-seeing (and thus all-powerful). What secures the illusory omnipotence of the spectator is precisely the spectator's own avoidance of being seen. Like God, the spectator sees all but remains constitutively unseen in the darkened auditorium.
The above scenario functions, however, only insofar as it remains unconscious and the spectator sustains the sense of being unseen. This is why, according to this version of psychoanalytic film theory, classical Hollywood narratives work to hide the camera's activity. Once the camera itself becomes an obvious presence rather than an invisible structuring absence, the spectator loses the position of omnipotence along with the camera and becomes part of the cinematic event. When this happens, the spectator becomes aware that the film is a product and not simply a reality. To forestall this recognition, classical Hollywood editing works to create a reality effect, a sense that the events on the screen are really happening
In 1977 Jacques Lacan (1901) wrote an essay titled "The Mirror Stage". The essay documented the theory that from birth humans are not complete, and an illusion of what is complete is obtained from the mirror (misrecognition). What is imagined to be real is seemingly completely inaccessible, similar to that of a mirrors reflection. When it comes to cinema, it is fair to say that the character's being is not complete until mirrored in the audience's reaction. In short, for the film to be brought into the realms of what is real and "out of the mirror" there needs to be an illusion that what is happening on the screen is actually happening. Nothing can break the delusion that the character is not truly feeling the emotions shown or that all around him is staged. The slightest falter and the illusion is destroyed, leaving the connection between the film and audience severed.
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