ABSTRACT
This chapter takes as its point of departure two positions that re-purpose the male gaze through a reflection on Lauren Bacall in Howard Hawks’ To Have and Have Not (1944). The speculative claim is that Bacall enacts and gives space for a gaze that should be understood as being simultaneously both had and not had. Central to this line of thinking is the idea that what is absent from any gaze manifests itself as an uncertain or unrealized fantasy. It is in this sense that there is an incompleteness to all forms of looking. Desire comes from imagining the possibility of a lost object—as Lacan would describe it, the petit object a—being regained. Conventionally, absence is indicated by what we see or don’t see on screen: the frame of the screen locks us into a certain visual order of things, yet we still know intuitively there is more outside of it. But what a symbolic encounter with Bacall represents is an endless desire, where there is no boundary or frame from which we can begin.
