In The Sound of Music:after Maria escapes from the von Trapp family back to the convent,unable to deal with her sexual attraction toward Baron von Trapp,she cannot find peace there,since she is still longing for the baron;
It follows in a memorable scene,the Mother Superior summons her and advises her to return to the von Trapp family,and try to sort out her relationship with the baron.She delivers this message in a weird song,“Climb Every Mountain!,”whose surprising theme is:'Do it! Take the risk',and try everything your heart desires!Do not allow petty considerations to stand in your way!
The uncanny power of this scene lies in its unexpected display of the spectacle of desire,which makes the scene literally embarrassing:the very person whom one would expect to preach abstinence and renunciation turns out to be the agent of fidelity to one’
Significantly, when The Sound of Music was shown in (still Socialist)Yugoslavia in the late 1960s,this scene—the three minutes of this song—was the only part of the film which was censored (cut).
The anonymous Socialist censor thereby displayed his profound sense of the truly dangerous power of Catholic ideology:far from being the religion of sacrifice,of the renunciation of earthly pleasures (in contrast to the pagan
affirmation of the life of the passions),Christianity offers a devious stratagem for indulging our desires without having to pay the price for them
There is thus
an element of truth in a joke about a young Christian girl’s ideal prayer to the
Virgin Mary:“O thou who conceived without having sinned,let me sin without having
to conceive!
That is to say for Lacan,the status of desire
is inherently ethical:“not to compromise one’s desire”ultimately equals “do
your duty'
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