The article offers an analysis of a once-famous Polish TV narrative for young audiences Stawiam na Tolka Banana [I’d bet on Tolek Banan] (1973, dir. Stanisław Jędryka), casting non-professional children actors and actresses whose superb and effortless performance still amazes. Beginning with the notion of TV series as a “repository of memory,” i.e. a document of cultural consciousness of its own era, the paper employs the Lacanian concepts of “fantasy,“ “Great Other,” “Master-signifier,” and the three registers of Lacan’s triadic division of human experience as analytical tools for the exploration of the mechanism of self-limiting, preemptive tools of subversion of official discourses present in the movie, such as: the discourse of Communist power and the patriarchal and androcentric discourse. In conclusion, the perspective is outlined for reading the film as an “incomplete deconstruction” of the discourse(s) of power, the notion of incompleteness pointing to a negotiation between the historical impossibility of a full rejection of those discourses by the movie and the incomplete control over the movie narrative and representation by those discourses.
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