Theories Which Relate To My Primary Text: Lacan

French theorist Jacques Lacan, an early and influencial theorist of child development, found the concept of the gaze important in what he termed the "mirror stage", whereupon children gaze at a mirror image of themselves (usually an image of themselves but a twin brother or sister can have the same effect) and use this image to derive a degree of coordination over their physical movements. Lacan therefore linked the concept of the gaze to individual human agency. To this end, he transformed the concept of the gaze into a dialect between what he called the ideal-ego and the ego-ideal. The ideal-ego is the image of imaginary self-identification- in other words, the idealized image that the person imagines themselves to be or aspires to be; whilst the ego-ideal is the imaginary gaze of another person who gazes upon the ideal-ego. An example would be if a famous rockstar (a category of identification which would function as the ideal-ego) secretly hoped that the school bully who tormented them as a child was now aware if his or her subsequent success and fame (with the imaginary, fantasmatic figure of the bully functioning as the ego ideal).

We can relate Lacan's theory to my primary coursework text which is "Made in Chelsea"- we can question the reality genre because the stars as so aware of their ego-ideal and the way in which they are represented. They know the cameras are there, and they are aware of what they look like whilst being filmed. They are presenting themselves are the person they aspire to be (and the person they think the audience would want to see) and so the audience are the ego-ideal. The audience are gazing upon the ideal-ego. The females in "Made in Chelsea" are very well made up throughout every episode, and what each of the characters say is most probably planned and scripted to a certain extent, simply because they are so aware of how people portray them. This raises the question about whether the genre is staying true to its name.