Sara Bédard-Goulet, researcher in contemporary literature ar the University of Tartu, presented a paper at the Deparment of English (Stockholm University) on a response event presented in Bambi and me by Michel Tremblay (Les Vues animées, trans. Sheila Fischman, 1998), a collection of autobiographical narratives about significant film experiences. It builds on reading and psychoanalytical theories to show that such a transformative event involves loss, which manifests itself spatially in the chapter titled “The March of the Wooden Soldiers”. Loss writing is closely linked to inhabiting and, in the present case, to fantasy, since it means, for young Tremblay, to discover and assume his sexual orientation by the agency of the film Babes in Toyland (1934), which he relates to toothpaste advertisement photographs.
