Abstract

Considered one of the great films in the history of cinema, George Stevens´s A place in the sun is based in Theodore Dreiser´s novel An american tragedy. The book was inspired in a crime that took place in the state of New York in 1906. Stevens´s screen version defers from the novel, as for the american director the story is less a social tragedy tan a tragedy of the desire. George Eastman´s drama is an example of what Jacques Lacan pointed out about guilt en his Seminary “The ethic of psychoanalysis”: “…what the subject actually feels guilty when he have guilt, in an acceptable or not acceptable way for the concience manager, is always, in its roots, to have ceded in his desire”. A place in the sun shows the path of an individual who betrays himself about his desire, how the goodness in favor of what he ceded his desire take him to the worse, and how justice mechanisms can turn accomplice in this autodestructive path.

Key words: Responsibility | Justice | Desire | Guilt