McGowan, Todd. “Introduction: The Bizarre Nature of Normality.” The Impossible
The great achievement of his films lies in their ability to break down the distance between spectator and screen. Rather than permitting the imaginary proximity that dominates in mainstream cinema, Lynch’s films implicate the spectator in their very structure. The structure of a Lynch film alters the cinematic viewing situation itself and deprives the spectator of the underlying sense of remaining at a safe distance from what takes place on the screen. Lynch includes cinematic moments that force the spectator to become aware of how the film itself takes into account the spectator’s desire. His films confront one with sequences that reveal one’s own investment in what one sees. 2
While watching a film, as
The thrill of voyeurism depends on a fundamental failure of self-recognition. The voyeur believes that she/he is looking at a scene that simply exists in itself and that has not been constructed for her/his look. Hence, the voyeur can see others in their private world, what exist beneath their public face, and the voyeur’s enjoyment derives from seeing this private world. This utterly private moment would be, in the thinking of the voyeur, what others were really like, how they appear when no one is looking.
But when the voyeur looks on this private moment, what she/he misses is its structured nature. Even the most intimate moments in our lives structure themselves around a public look, even when that look is absent. The subject in a private moment continues, albeit most often unconsciously, to act and present her/himself for an imagined look*. We perform our intimate activities in ways that confirm a certain idea we have of ourselves, and this self-image implies an external look—what Freud calls an ego ideal—that apprehends it. The implicit onlooker gives meaning and structure to the private activity. Without the implicit onlooker or ego ideal, we would have no sense of how to act in private, no method for organizing our private lives**. In short, the scene that the voyeur witnesses is always a scene created for the look of the voyeur, and this what the voyeur cannot see.
There is something fundamentally disappointing about voyeurism: it never sees what it’s looking for but instead sees a moment created for its look. The structured nature of the private moment is most emphatically true in the case of cinema: we cannot even imagine a film not organized around the look of a spectator, and yet this is precisely what most films—and, just as importantly, most spectators—attempt to disavow. In this sense, the film itself does look back at the spectators insofar as its very structure takes their desire as spectators into account. There is no film that has been made not to be seen***. 3-4
*This is a point that Jean-Paul Sartre stresses in his chapter on “The Look” in Being and Nothingness. For Sartre, the subject cannot avoid its fundamental situatedness, which means that it cannot avoid the Other’s look, which follows the subject everywhere. As Sartre puts it, “The Other is present to me everywhere as the one through whom I become an object.” Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingess, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Washingto Square Press, 1956), 373.
225, note 6
**Wittgenstein makes a similar point when he insists that there is no private language. For Wittgenstein, language, with its basis in rules, depends on the existence of multiple speakers. To give a rule to oneself alone would be nonsensical because no one could say whether one violates the rule or not. As Saul Kripke puts it in his groundbreaking work on Wittgenstein’s private language argument, “all the talk of an individual following rules has references to him as a member of a community” (Saul Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language: An Elementary Exposition [Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982], 109). Though we can use language privately, language originates as a public activity, and this public dimension continues to inform every private use. 226, note 7
***Even the filmmaker who makes films just for her/himself, films never to be screened for a single spectator, nonetheless posits the nonexistent spectator in the making of the film. As is the case with the diarist, this film-makers makes reference to the spectator or audience through the very act o turning to an inherently public medium. If one were simply making a film for oneself or writing for oneself, there would be no need for the detour through a form that others are able to comprehend. This detour testifies to the presence of the public at the heart of the most private production. 226, note 8.
Transferring Brecht’s theoretical innovations from the theater to the cinema, film theorists and filmmakers embraced a filmmaking style that foregrounded spectator distance from the activities on the screen and took up what Brecht calls the “alienation-effect.” 6
This allusion to psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Lacan’s categories of experience—the imaginary and the symbolic—provides another way of understanding the relationship between proximity and distance in the cinema. The symbolic order, for Lacan, is the order of language and society: it provides the structure that organizes our social reality and creates the identities that we inhabit. This order underlies the visible world and thus remains largely invisible, though its laws determine much of what happens in the visible world. It functions through absence, shaping our lives in ways that we remain unaware of. What we see, in contrast, is the imaginary, a world of images that appear to be immediately present. The imaginary deceives us insofar as it hides the underlying symbolic structure that upholds it. For instance, the image of an authority figure as a genuinely caring person, even if it is true, masks the domination that inheres in her/his very symbolic position as an authority figure. She/he appears warm and accessible, but this obscures the symbolic, structural distance between the authority figure and us as ordinary subjects. Exposing the symbolic authority beneath the imaginary guise becomes a political project. Similarly, theorists like Mulvey and
Penley’s critique here calls for a filmmaker who would forsake the false immediacy of the cinematic imaginary for a filmmaking style that highlighted the symbolic mediation always at work but unperceived in the cinematic experience. The most prominent filmmaker who embodies this theoretical aspiration is undoubtedly Jean-Luc Godard (thought it predominates throughout avant-garde cinema). 7
The hope underlying this type of cinema is actually a fundamentally anti-cinematic one. It aims to use the cinema to assist the spectator in transcending the cinema’s fascination. The ideal spectator for this alternative cinema will escape the seduction of fantasy and thus be able to see the actual structure of the cinema and of society itself. That is, the ideal subject will see the reality of the production process rather than the fascinating commodities that disguise the process. By accomplishing this, the spectator will be on the way to becoming a radical subject ready to change existing social relations because this spectator will no longer be blind to the way things really are. Ideally, such a spectator will overcome commodity fetishism itself, in which, according to Marx’s famous formulation, “a definite social relation between men…assumes…the fantastic form of a relation between things. By exposing the image as constructed, as the product of a “definite social relation,” Godard’s films attack this form of fascination at a site (the cinema) where it usually predominates. Grasping one’s alienation in the cinema would become the key, ultimately to revolutionizing capitalist society. 9
The problem with the attempt to create a spectator whom the cinema does not seduce is its tacit assumption: it imagines that the spectator can attain a pure viewing position. The Brechtian aesthetic forgets about the desire of the spectator and fails to see how desire necessarily implicates the spectator in what occurs on the screen. Even though distance is inherent in the cinematic viewing situation itself, no spectator can remain completely distanced, even from a Godard film. Some element of fascination remains at work and continues to involve the spectator in the images on the screen—or else the spectator would simply walk out of the film. In other words, a film’s alienation-effect has to fail to some extent in order for the film to retain the desire of its spectators. The successfully distanced spectator ceases to be a spectator at all. 9
The impossibility of the pure spectator condemns the Brechtian aesthetic to an unending pursuit, but doesn’t necessarily indicate that the pursuit itself is wrongheaded. The deeper problem with the opposition to cinematic fascination lies in its conception of what motivates political activity and change. This position contends that knowledge itself—seeing how things really are, how the production process really works, etc.—has a radicalizing effect on spectators and subjects in general. According to this view, subjects accept their subjection to an oppressive social order only because they fail to recognize than an element of fascination has duped them into this acceptance. Thus, the thinking goes, if we remove the fascination and expose the relations of production as they actually are, we will produce radical subjects. But knowledge without desire does not inherently create political subjects. Contemporary capitalist society thrives on the participation of subjects who see through the prevailing ideology and yet continue to obey. 9-10
The further lacuna in the Brechtian aesthetic is its inability to consider a motivation for political change within fascination itself. Though fascination accommodates subjects to their subjection, it also has the ability to encourage them to challenge that subjection. This is because fantasy as such emerges in order to cover up a real gap within ideology or the symbolic order. Lacan uses the term “real” as a third category of experience (in addition to imaginary and symbolic) to indicate the incompleteness of the symbolic structure, its failure to constitute itself as a coherent whole. Ideology uses fantasy to shore up its point of greatest weakness—the point at which its explanations of social phenomena break down—and this injects a potential radicality into every fantasy that proponents of the Brechtian aesthetic fail to see. In the act of decrying fantasy as an imaginary manipulation, the proponents of a distancing cinema fail to see the real moment within every fantasy. It is this moment that the films of David Lynch emphasize. 10
Lynch’s distinctiveness stems from his ability to exist within mainstream cinema and independent cinema simultaneously. 11
He is not simply a director celebrated at
Lynch’s films do not always receive a welcome reception among critics or the public, but the bare fact that films such as his gain widespread attention at all is startling. 11
This book is an attempt to come to terms with the incongruity of Lynch’s position within contemporary cinema and to link this incongruity with the aesthetic that Lynch develops in his films. 11
What Nochimson’s thesis leaves unexplained is the predominance of “substitutes for life”—Hollywood fantasies—within Lynch’s films. 11
As a filmmaker who privileges fantasy and what it can accomplish, David Lynch turns Godard’s program on its head. Though both share the aim of altering the spectator’s relationship to the given social reality, they go about accomplishing this in opposite ways. Whereas Godard (like many alternative filmmakers) works to alienate spectators and force them to recognize their distance from the images on the screen, Lynch tries to close this distance to an even greater extent than typical
Rather than complicate or even undo binary positions, Lynch revels in them. 12
Ironically, the films seems bizarre to us precisely because of the excessiveness of their normality—another twist in the separation between a filmmaker such as Jean-Luc Godard and Lynch. Whereas Godard aims at offering an alternative to bourgeois cinema and bourgeois life, Lynch wants to embody it fully. He is, in a word, bizarrely normal. This is what separates Lynch from so many of the other filmmakers existing on the outskirts and outside of
Through the act of taking normality to its logical extreme, Lynch reveals how the bizarre is not opposed to the normal but inherent within it. To this end, his personal idiosyncrasies function as an extension of this fundamental idea informing his films. Through the way that Lynch engages in them, behaviors central to American mythology take on an alien appearance. This leads Paul Woods to label Lynch “an All-American Martian Boy.” Lynch’s childhood in small-town
In Lacan’s idiom, this figure who embodies the social order and its regulations is the Other. 14
The depthlessness of signifiers—as Joan Copjec insists, “signifiers are not transparent”—inevitably creates a sense of mystery concerning the desire that might lie beneath. The subject’s desire arises out of the encounter with the indecipherable desire of the Other, and in this sense, as Lacan often repeats, one’s desire is the desire of the Other. The problem of this desire is that it is always elsewhere; we can never pin it down, just like we can never pin down the moment that is “now.” For the subject within language (for every subject), it is an impossible object. 14
Through fantasy, we do the impossible, accessing the impossible desire of the Other and glimpsing the enjoyment that it promises. The Other’s desire becomes a secret that one might uncover, not a constitutively impossible object that exists only in its absence. We don’t necessarily fantasize obtaining this object and enjoying the possession of it. Instead, fantasy constructs a narrative that explains the loss of the object and/or points towards its recovery. This narrative gives meaning to the loss of the object and transforms the impossible object into a possible one. For instance, the fantasy of humanity’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden allows us to believe that paradise is a possibility, even though it is lost. Such an idea offers us a feeling of hope amidst the generalized dissatisfaction that characterizes our experience of the object as an impossibility. 15
There is always some slippage between normality on the one hand and neurosis and psychosis on the other. Unlike the “normal” subject, neurotics and psychotics don’t experience things so clearly. The psychotic confuses reality and fantasy and experiences them as equivalent, while the neurotic seeks in fantasy a substitute satisfaction for what she or he did not find in reality. Hence, for the psychotic every experience, even a fatasmatic one, seems real, and for the neurotic every experience, even a real one, has at least a hint of fantasy. There is, in both cases, a blurring of the lines.
This blurring of the lines occurs in most films as well. Narrative films typically revolve around the intermixing and interaction of desire and fantasy. Desire fuels the movement of narrative because it is the search for answers, a process of questioning, an opening to possibility. Fantasy, in contrast, provides an answer to this questioning, a solution to the enigma of desire (albeit an imaginary one), a resolution of uncertainties. In our experience of most films—films that have an evident narrative coherence—the relationship between desire and fantasy appears seamless: we can’t readily delineate the precise moment at which we pass from desire to fantasy, nor do they appear as separate realms. Instead, fantasy is constantly there, clearing up desire’s ambiguities. We don’t know exactly what will happen next, but we do feel secure in a reality replete with meaning—a reality in which events fundamentally make sense. It is the task of fantasy to provide us with this sense of inhabiting a truly meaningful reality, a reality in which meaning itself is not up for grabs. 16
Memento sticks out because it provides a world of desire in a relatively pure form, not blending it with fantasy. 17
In Double Indemnity—as in most films and as in our everyday experience—the worlds of desire and fantasy overlap and commingle. Lynch’s films, however, attempt to hold these worlds separate. 18
This separation marks the beginning of Lynch’s impossible cinema. The idea of a pure desire, a desire unmediated by fantasy, is itself the ultimate fantasy; desire does not exist prior to fantasy but emerges out of it. Fantasy does not simply provide an answer for the question posed by desire; instead, desire poses the question for the answer that fantasy provides. Or, as Slavoj Zizek puts it, “It is only through fantasy that the subject is constituted as desiring: through fantasy, we learn how to desire.” Hence, Lynch’s depiction of the world of desire prior to fantasy would be unthinkable outside the fantasmatic medium of film itself. He uses filmic fantasy to present desire in its immediacy and thereby allows us to see precisely how desire and fantasy interrelate. 18
Lynch’s films present the distinct worlds of desire and fantasy through radical differences in form within each film. The model for his films is The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939), which creates a division between the social reality of
Taking The Wizard of Oz as his point of departure, Lynch depicts worlds of desire by emphasizing the absence of the object. These worlds are typically sparse and bland, if not bleak and desolate. The dark lighting-stilted acting, minimal décor, and an absence of movement within shots in the first part of
The worlds of fantasy in Lynch’s films mark definitive contrast. Here, the excess and heightened presence of the filmic image that we associate with cinema as such bursts forth. Rather than enduring the absence of the impossible object-cause of desire, the spectator finds indications of this object everywhere, either in specific characters like Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) populating the underworld in Blue Velvet or in the bright and colorful setting we see when Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) first appears in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992). Through their excessiveness, the fantasy worlds unleash enjoyment on both the characters within them and the spectator watching. As a result, they are as difficult to experience as the worlds of desire, though for the opposite reason. While watching the worlds of fantasy unfold in a Lynch film, one sees too much of the object and enjoys too much. But this alternating experience of absence and excessive presence is normality itself. By separating the realms of desire and fantasy, Lynch’s film provide an unsettling insight into normality that everyday life militates against. 20
Lynch’s films disconcert us precisely because they confront us with normality—and normality seems completely foreign. 20
Because Lynch’s films create a separation between the realms of desire and fantasy, they have the ability to immerse us as spectators more completely in the fantasmatic world. 21
But Lynch’s films do not depict fantasy in this unadulterated way in order to display the dangers of fascination. The total experience of fantasy that the Lynch film creates aims to trigger a spectator response of identification with the traumatic moment enacted within the fantasy. Lynch offers the fantasmatic experience in order to facilitate this identification with what seems most distant from and foreign to us as spectators. 22
Lynch’s cinematic fantasies contain the truth of our being insofar as they reveal where we direct our desire. Our everyday experience allows our own desire to remain unconscious: we don’t see how our desire shapes what we see; we believe that we simply see what appears in the world to be seen. By presenting us with an alternate fantasmatic world vastly different from our everyday experience, Lynch creates a situation where the distorting power of our desire becomes visible to us. Our very investment in the fantasies that his films offer reveals our unconscious: we experience a familiarity in what is completely unfamiliar.
In this way, Lynch’s filmmaking testifies to its kinship with Hegelian philosophy. He is the Hegel of filmmakers, one of the few directors to use cinema to enact a process on the spectator that Hegel can only describe. Philosophical thinking, in Hegel’s mind, involves “pure self-recognition in absolute otherness,” a recognition that one’s identity exists outside oneself in the object that appears most other to oneself. This is the recognition of what Hegel calls speculative identity: in the act of speculative identity, the subject grasps its connection with what it cannot encompass. 23
Lynch’s films demand that the spectator revaluate her/his relationship to the cinema. The cinema is no longer an escape without any connection to the outside world, nor is it a reality unto itself. Instead, it is the reverse side of that outside world—the fantasmatic underside that holds the truth of the latter. 24
Despite the great variety in their subject matter, Lynch’s films always end the same way—with an impossible act that fundamentally alters the very structure of the filmic world. 25
For Lacan, a link exists between impossibility and what he calls the real. Within every symbolic order, the real occupies the place of what cannot be thought or imagined—the position of the impossible. The real is not reality but the failure of the symbolic order to explain everything. When seen in this light, the impossible is not materially impossible but rather logically impossible as long as we remain within the current social structure. In Seminar XVII, Lacan claims that “the real is the impossible. Not on account of a simple stumbling block against which we bang our heads, but because of the logical stumbling block of what announces itself as impossible in the symbolic. It is from there that the real arises.” What is impossible in the symbolic order is, in the real, perfectly achievable. it is in this sense of the term impossible that Lynch’s films allow us to experience it actually taking place. They thus provide a fundamental challenge to the ruling symbolic structure, forcing us to see possibilities where we are used to seeing impossibilities.
The events depicted within Lynch’s films reflect the relationship with the spectator that these films construct. Just as the characters in Lynch’s films must endure the realization of their fantasies without respite, so must the spectator of these films. To watch a David Lynch film properly is always to touch the screen, to find oneself bereft of the safe distance that the very architecture of the cinema seems to promise.
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