McGowan, Todd. “Finding Ourselves on a Lost Highway.” The Impossible
David Lynch.
As Anne Jerslev rightly points out, “More than Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me,
Its difficulties derive from making evident an underlying logic of fantasy that is operative, though certainly not apparent, in the filmic experience itself. Because the narrative of Lost Highway brings the logic of fantasy out into the open, it necessarily strikes us as incongruous, as a film without a narrative altogether. 155
The separation of desire and fantasy also makes clear the way in which fantasy acts as a compensation for what the social reality doesn’t provide. 155
Through the wide visual divergence between the world of Fred and the world of Peter, Lynch establishes them cinematically as worlds of desire and of fantasy, respectively. 156
By minimizing the depth of field in the shots of Fred’s world, Lynch creates a sense of flatness in that world. Everything seems to be taking place on the surface, without any depth. 156
While he lights all the main rooms of the house with low, though adequate lighting, Lynch leaves the hallways completely dark, indicating this void beneath the surface, the void from which desire emerges. Such darkness is absent in Peter’s world. From the moment Peter appears, the mise-en-scene is wholly different: bright lighting, more colorful furniture and décor, and no empty spaces. 157
She seems to have, somewhere within her, some hidden kernel of excessive enjoyment that Fred can’t access. 157
Desire is an effort to figure out what the Other wants from me. 159
Even asking the Other to demonstrate her/his desire physically in an effort to elude language would come up against the same stumbling block: as beings of language, even our gestures function as signifiers, which means that they are opaque and appear to hide desire. 159
Desire is the result of our insertion into language, but nonetheless it can’t be named by that language. 159
Whereas fantasy offers an imaginary answer to desire’s question, the law attempts to arrest the very process of questioning itself, along with the disturbance it provokes. 160
In order to better observe desire, the law has a representative within the psyche, the superego, that watches over the subject from the inside. The superego is the psychical agency of self-observation, and though it is a part of the psyche, its attachment to the law makes it seems as if the superego comes from the outside. In
In giving up his desire, Fred opens the door to the superego, “inviting” it into his psyche.
[247, note 8]: This is why giving in to the superego is always a no-win situation. The more you give, the more it wants. The superego is, in this sense, insatiable: no sacrifice of desire is ever enough to quench its thirst. One can see this dynamic of the superego is someone like Jonathan Edwards, who never ceases upbraiding himself for the depths of his sinfulness, even though to the outside observer he is an exemplar of virtue and piety. This is not just a rhetorical flourish on his part. Edwards does feel more sinful than the average person insofar as he has given in to the superego more than the average person.
The evening after Fred and Renee receive the first tape, Fred posits an increasingly greater desire to Renee, “seeing” her present at the club that night with another guy (Andy, as we learn later). Later that night, Fred tries to have sex with Renee, but is unable to—and unable to give her what he thinks she wants. And from Renee’s response, we can see that this isn’t the first time. Fred’s impotence—or simply his inability to satisfy Renee sexually—further empowers his superego because it makes him feel even more estranged from her desire and even guiltier. We get confirmation of this when Fred, just after their failed sexual experience, recounts a dream to Renee. He tells her, “There you were lying in bed. It wasn’t you but it looked like you.” Instead of her face, in the dream-image we see the face of the Mystery Man (Robert Blake), who turns out to be—we don’t this yet at this point in the film—the one responsible for the videotape. 161
When the Mystery Man approaches Fred in order to speak with him, the background noise of the party dims to become almost inaudible, as if, in the midst of this crowded party, the Mystery man and Fred are having a private—intrapsychic—conversation. 162
Even though the superego is, for psychoanalysis, the advocate for morality within the psyche, it nonetheless demands Renee’s murder. How does this square with the idea of the superego as a “moral” agency? Morality always comes down to—and this is why Lacan contrasts it with an ethics of desire—the command to sacrifice the object because the object’s ambiguity is what keeps pushing desire forward. Morality aims, in short, at arresting the disturbance that desire causes. 163
Thus, we see Fred, after having killed her, dismembering Renee’s body in an effort to find this object somewhere in her body. 163
Furthermore, if fantasy is supposed to offer respite from the unpleasantness of reality, it seems that Fred should demand at least a partial refund. Renee’s enigmatic desire may be disconcerting, but in his fantasmatic alternative, he knows that
The real is the transitional point at which fantasy emerges. 165
Just as Fred’s splitting headaches indicate the presence of the traumatic real in the world of desire, Peter’s head wound indicates its presence in the world of fantasy. 166
If it is the case that Fred’s world is one of desire and Peter’s world is one of fantasy, then this suggests that all the background elements that give our existence its sense of completeness are fantasmatic. The ability to grasp oneself in a specific sociohistorical setting is fantasmatic because it makes us feel secure—rooted, connected to people, place, and time. Fred’s existence has no such stability; it is the free-floating existence indicative of a world of desire without fantasy. In Fred’s world, we have no way of getting our bearings, no clear markers to latch onto, so that we should even hesitate to call it a “world” at all. Peter’s, on the other hand, offers us clear points of reference. In depicting this contrast, Lynch shows the extent to which a “sense of reality” actually has little to do with reality itself. It depends fundamentally upon a well-developed “sense of fantasy.” 167
By shooting Peter’s world—the world of fantasy—in a realistic style, Lynch makes evident the fantasmatic underpinnings of our sense of reality. 168
Unlike Renee,
Though
This transformation reveals, as Slavoj Zizek notes, “that the fantasmatic way out was a false exit, that in all imaginable/possible universes, failure is what awaits us.” Getting too close to “having” the fantasy object triggers the dissolution of the fantasy. Peter can only “have”
The moment at which we would actually enjoy the object directly in the fantasy, the object gets up and walks away, and the fantasy structure itself dissolves. Fantasy requires some distance if it is to remain pleasurable and stable. 172
After the fantasy has dissolved and Fred has accepted his symbolic mandate, he is able to kill the father (Mr. Eddy) with the help of the Mystery Man because the father is, at this point, but a remnant of the fantasy. After Fred has internalized the paternal authority, the Mystery Man can shoot Mr. Eddy in the head because external authority is no longer necessary to control Fred’s behavior; he has thoroughly introjected this authority now in the form of the superego. 173
The superego is the completion of the father’s function and thus renders the father unnecessary. 173
In making this sacrifice, Fred gains access to the father’s secret, the secret of the law, and this secret is what the Mystery Man whispers into Fred’s ear after he kills Mr. Eddy.
What is the law’s secret? That the law is nothing but its secret, that the father never really was alive with enjoyment, except in the fantasy of the son. This becomes evident when the Mystery Man, just prior to shooting him, presents Mr. Eddy with a video screen that displays the latter in his obscene enjoyment. What we see on the screen, however, is not Mr. Eddy enjoying himself, but him watching other people enjoy. The father, the master of enjoyment, turns out to be capable only of watching others enjoy, not enjoying himself. In this sense, the fact that Mr. Eddy is a pornographer makes perfect sense. 173
As Lacan puts it in Seminar VII, “If for us God is dead, it is because he always has been dead, and that’t what Freud says. He has never been the father except in the mythology of the son.” 174
At the moment of submission to the law—the moment of the superego’s complte introjection—Fred should be a perfectly docile subject. He is bereft of even imaginary, substitute enjoyment. Instead of being docile, however, Fred responds with a renewed effort to subvert the power of the law. without the supplemental, substitute enjoyment which fantasy provides, part of the control that the law has over Fred evaporates. We thus ee the way in which the imaginary enjoyment that fantasy provides assists in the process of creating contented, docile subjects. This becomes apparent in Lost Highway as we see what happens when fantasy is absent.
At this point, Fred thinks that if he can communicate the secret of the law to himself prior to the sacrifice of his desire, then he will be able to act upon his recognition. In depicting Fred in an attempt to communicate with himself, Lynch is again separating what we usually experience as something seamless. Fred exists here at two different moments: one after his successful integration into the social order and one prior to it. The latter moment is, in actuality, inaccessible to us, though we constantly imagine that we are accessing it. This is why the film shows Fred as he drives home and tells himself through the intercom of his house, “Dick Laurent is dead”—thereby repeating the opening scene of the film (but this time from the outside of the house). In telling himself “Dick Laurent is dead,” Fred is trying to make clear tomself that the father (Dick Laurent / Mr. Eddy) who he supposes to be enjoying women is already dead. If he could communicate this, he would save himself the sacrifice of the object to a dead authority. But the communication misses the mark. Rather than allaying Fred’s suspicions that someone else is enjoying Renee, this remark made through the intercom actually serves to multiply them (if not trigger them itself)—again launching Fred on the path we have just witnessed for the last two hours. 175
But what Lost Highway shows is that in the last instance there is no difference between success and failure: even when we construct a scenario that allows us to have the impossible object, we cannot possess the key that renders the object enjoyable. 175
Of all Lynch’s films,
But these qualifications of fantasy’s power should not be seen as part of an indictment of fantasy as such. An absolute commitment to fantasy is, even in
[note 30, 250]: For Hegel, both art and philosophy have a clear political task: they reconcile subjects to the existing order. Despite how this sounds, such a task is fundamentally radical rather than conservative. By reconciling subjects to the existing order, art and philosophy expose the way in which all alternatives exist in the here and now rather than in a possible or imaginary future. They are implicit in the current order, already written into it and awaiting realization, though they remain hidden in the guise of possible futures. Once one recognizes this, one becomes a politicized subject. Rather than dreaming about a fantasmatic alternative, the reconciled subject works to bring it to light.
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