The NeverEnding Story III and the Incest Fantasy

In The NeverEnding Story III: Return to Fantasia, Bastian is given a stepsister, Nicole, played by Melody Kay. Bastian is thus positioned within two major heterosexual pairings—one with the Empress (here played by Julie Cox), one with his stepsister—but only one of these pairings is properly reproductive, and that one, not accidently, is sexlessly so. (Although not nearly so much so as with Tami Stronach's Empress in the first film. Julie Cox's portrayal is only a hair's breadth from downright coquettish; she practically flutters her eyes when Bastian enters the Crystal Cave and remarks, "The Auryn has sent me a hero.")

The other is incestuous. The desire for completion which in psychoanalytic schema like Edelman's lies at the root of heterosexual desire manifests itself not as the desire for a mate, but for a sibling. "All his life," Bastian reads about himself in The Neverending Story, "Bastian wanted a sister or a brother, to share his dreams and confide in his secrets. Now, at last, he would have one."

It is Bastian's stepsister, Nicole, still coping with the reality of her parents' divorce (and now her mother's remarriage), who assumes the rôle of synthomosexual. Thus, in this third film the figures of the Child and the synthomosexual are set up against each other. Nicole refuses at first to embrace the futurist vision of her mother's remarriage: "They are not my family and this is not their house." Nor does she find anything commendable about her new brother's taste for the fantastic: "Spare me this New Age nonsense," she says. Even when she is forced to accept, on the evidence of her senses, the existence of magic, she does not automatically subscribe to the futurist vision of her brother and the Childlike Empress. Instead, she uses the omnipotent Auryn, which she stole from her brother thinking it was only an attractive piece of jewelry, to go on a shopping spree.

This prompts the following exchange in Fantasia, explicitly setting up the two girls as foils:

EMPRESS: You know something? In all the time I've been Empress, it never occurred to me to go shopping with the Auryn.

OLD MAN: Well, that's because you serve a higher purpose, my Empress.

EMPRESS: (vaguely disappointed) Oh.

For the Childlike Empress, the Auryn's powers must be always used in service of the "higher purpose" of reproductive futurism, but the synthomosexual Nicole subverts this purpose by using the Auryn for her own satisfaction in the present. As Nicole usurps the position of the Childlike Empress in terms of effective power by taking the Auryn, she also does so in terms of the girls' relationship with Bastian, transferring his cathective relationship with the Empress and Fantasia to their "real world," unprocreative brother-sister relationship. (Of course, since Bastian and Nicole are not biological siblings, the impossibility of procreation is itself fantasmic, forbidden only--but crucially--on the level of the symbolic.) "I want you to be my brother," she begs Bastian at the climax of the film in a rainy alley, inspiring him to face the Nasties and save the day. If they were not written as stepsiblings, this is the moment in the film where they would have kissed (and I always not-so-secretly want them to do so).

If Bastian's cathexis towards his stepsister takes on, as I am arguing and as arguably all cathexis must, sexual overtones (strictly speaking, cathexis is the more primitive understanding, the one in terms of which sexual desire must be explained; however, as cathective behavior manifests itself sexually, all cathexis becomes sexualized), it becomes what Edelman calls "the place where sexuality and the force of the death drive overlap":

In this they bespeak what regimes of normativity, of sexual meaningfulness, disavow: the antisocial bent of sexuality as such, acknowledged, and then as pathology, only in those who are bent themselves. (143)

The pathology that Edelman is thinking of here is of course homosexuality, but incest—as antisocial (and in this case) heterosexual sexuality—works at least as well. (Of course, to a less-abstract queer theoretic perspective than Edelman's, this appropriation of the queer on the part of heterosexuality would be noteworthy. On the other hand, simply in terms of psychoanalytic transgression, it seems to be the case that incest is even more queer than homosexuality itself.)

The purity of Fantasia itself, almost as if in response, is warped and mangled in the third film. The fantastic creatures make references to the human world utilizing knowledge they shouldn't have, casually mentioning commercial airplanes, Las Vegas, and Arnold Schwarzenegger; listen to rock music (the pun involving the rockbiter is downright painful); and even watch television. The metaphysics of The Neverending Story are twisted beyond comprehension to serve the purposes of the plot. Even the Empress herself is compromised: the regal innocence of 11-year old Tami Stronach's Empress is replaced by the Empress portrayed by 21-year-old (yes, you read that right--and you can imagine that I felt a lot less guilty about thinking the Childlike Empress was hot once I found this out) Julie Cox, less the solemn ruler and more a willful Valley Girl with a British accent. The fetishistic purity of both the Empress and her imaginary empire is thus revealed to be ultimately, and necessarily, unstable.

This breakdown is exacerbated by events within the (meta)text itself, as a third nihilistic force, this time known as "the Nasty" and controlled by a gang of juvenile delinquents (led by Jack Black and known as "the Nasties") in the (diegetic) human world, and who have gained possession of The Neverending Story, engulfs Fantasia, causing all of its inhabitants to "act crazy," overwhelmed by aggression. What little solemnity this Fantasia had is now lost, and the Empress and her courtiers set upon each other, taunting each other like toddlers.

The Nasty even interferes with the very mechanism of The Neverending Story itself, spilling out beyond the parameters that nihilistic forces were, paradoxically, kept within in the previous two films. The film opens with an old man hunched in front of a book, reading it out loud as words magically appear on its pages, informing both him and the viewer of the metaphysical nature of the Nasty:

The mountains of destiny mark the highest point in all of Fantasia. It is here in a hidden crystal cave that the Old Man of Wandering Mountain records The Neverending Story. [. . .] There will be a day when the recording stylus will start to act strangely, making it increasingly difficult to record the Neverending Story. This is a sign that the Nasty is on the way, an evil force that first takes hold in young humans when they turn away from books and reading.

But already the stylus' strange behavior has become evident, so that this moment, like that of the film, not only represents a rupture, but exists as one.

At the end of film, of course, the necessary futurist logic ultimately takes its inevitable course: the Nasty is fought back, the Nasties are transformed by the Auryn's magic into preppy nerds (the consent issues of which are never addressed), and everyone lives happily ever after. In a sense, however, the damage has been done, as this film admits what the previous two had only implied: this "happily ever after" is purchased only with the complete defeat of the imaginary over the real, whereas within this now-hybrid world, Bastian's cathexis has been successfully transferred from the imaginary Empress to his very real sister. The need for imagination qua imagination has been eliminated; magic is now valued only for its ability to affect the human world, that which was but is no longer the "real" world. Nicole is never forced to meaningfully abandon her synthomosexuality.