ABSTRACT
In “Phantom Thread: Threading Between Dresses and Debts,” Trent Ludwig sees in Phantom Thread a constellation of Oedipalized desire interpreted halfway between Freud and Gilles Deleuze. Having lost his mother in a marriage to a second father, a famous couturier develops stratagems to cope with the loss of his love object, like recreating his mother’s wedding dress. Alma wears a dress that reenacts the mother’s absence, which allows Woodcock to achieve a “becoming-mother” in his union with Alma. In a reversal of the previous pattern, instead of making a dress that causes his deceased mother to leave him, Woodcock regains his dead mother by making more dresses. However, the hidden thread is also knotted by the sister to whom Woodcock owes a debt. Indeed Cyril, his helper and adviser, never married because of a curse brought about by her work on the mother’s wedding dress. But, Alma stops the cycle by poisoning Reynolds and almost killing him, which places him in an infantile position and leads to his rebirth. He can then reclaim his dead mother at a moment anterior to his debt to Cyril. A Deleuzian logic predicated on the ontology of desire, or desire understood as “becoming,” yields an original interpretation of the plot of this superb film.
