The Obscure Object of Desire: Trace, Image and Apocalypse in Modern Cinema

Sažetak

This essay examines how desire and objects interact in mo­dern cinema to produce what Gilles Deleuze calls cinematic sin­gularity. I argue that this singularity emerges through the repetiti­on of trace, image, and camera movement – elements that exceed established cinematic codes and resist the order of generality, re­semblance, and quantification. Within this excess, modern cinema reveals obscure objects of desire that disturb narrative coherence and expose the instability of representation itself.

My argument unfolds through three case studies: Michelan­gelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966), Jovan Jovanović’s Young and Healthy as a Rose (1971), and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apoca­lypse Now (1979). Each film stages a different moment in the transformation of the cinematic image. Antonioni’s photograp­hic investigation turns the trace into an unstable signifier, where visual evidence dissolves into uncertainty. Jovanović’s Yugoslav countercultural experiment radicalizes the image as a site of ide­ological and libidinal excess. Coppola’s war epic ultimately pu­shes the cinematic image toward apocalypse, where language itself begins to fracture under the pressure of historical violence. Across these films, the obscure objects of desire appear as retur­ning signifiers of neurosis, fetishism, and psychic disturbance, bringing cinema close to what Julia Kristeva describes as the abject – “a flaw in Oedipus’ impossible sovereignty, a flaw in his knowledge.”

This epistemological rupture functions as a Lacanian sint­home: a point where subjectivity confronts its own otherness. The emergence of this cinematic singularity is crystallized in the iconic beach scene of Apocalypse Now, when Lieutenant Co­lonel Kilgore’s celebrated “napalm” monologue transforms the language of military triumph into a strangely lyrical expression of destruction. Here the breakdown of ideological discourse, reminiscent of Louis Althusser’s notion of ideological appara­tus, produces what Roland Barthes calls a “third meaning”: an obtuse level of signification where language slips into a poetic register bordering on abjection.

Drawing on a transdisciplinary framework that includes phi­losophy (Baudrillard, Deleuze, Althusser), psychoanalysis (La­can, Kristeva), semiotics (Eco, Saussure), political theory (Djilas, Debord), cultural studies (Vulović), quantum physics (Carroll), and classical film theory (Oudart), in this essay I explore how modern cinema stages the emergence of these singularities at the threshold between desire, image, and apocalypse.