Learning from the 'Symbolic Other' : reading Spielberg's filmatic representation of 'War Horse'

Spielberg’s filmatic adaptation of Michael Morpugo‘s novel War Horse is an emblematic representation of the immaculate atrocities of World War I. The impact of the film and its ability to touch our hearts is due to the undeniable, raw view point of the war and the emotions surrounding it from the perspective of Joey, the horse. Unsaid by humans, and generating from a beast, the catharsis and the purgation of emotions (quoting Aristotelian philosophy) have a larger emphasis on the message connoted on humans. The speculation of the ego of man in war and the reflection in the Lacanian ‘mirror stage’ is transmitted via Joey’s image. This image derives man his identification of his position in war and its dialectics. Hence, the Symbolic and the Real are fearfully synonymous in Joey, the horse. The realization of this truth outside what is obvious is a very Zizekian interpretation of Lacanian theory. For Zizek, the truth of ourselves lies outside ourselves in the Symbolic and the Real, rather than being buried deep within us. Hence, the power of a horse to generate the effect, and thanks to Spielbergian effects, the impact of the novel is immense.

The film and its story touch a fundamental Lacanian realization: that self-realization is impossible from within. It is Joey, who symbolically draws man towards the realization of the futility of war, by showing how he touches the souls of all who come in contact: the British, German and the French. Human boundaries are then shown to be translatable via the symbolic identity of a horse. Joey’s travels, hardships and encounters in the war, his attachment to his fellow horse (Topthorn) and his love for Albert, the young man who bred Joey to adulthood and whom he never forgets elevates Joey into an almost human-like status. The human emotions that are stirred through Joey’s life and the human capability of all the different owners through which he passes through destabilizes what was then known of the war and brings us to a realization of its Ideology from the perspective of what we actually do. This is Zizek’s basic presumption of Ideology; that it is actually a construct of what we do and not of what is already known. In the face of this innovative approach, Althusser’s Ideological State Apparatus of a subject as being always already identified, becomes a destabilized and archaic notion for us who live in a post-ideological era, and what matters is what we do, not what is already known. Hence, the appropriation of Zizek’s book title to read as ‘for they know not what they did’ in World War I remains an iconic realization of the self via Joey, the symbolic other.