McGowan, Todd. “Navigating Mulholland Drive, David Lynch’s Panegyric to
Hollywood.” The Impossible David Lynch. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. 194-219.

By combining sense with the texture of fantasy, Lynch uses the first part of Mulholland Drive to explore the role that fantasy has in rendering our experience coherent and meaningful.

The narrative coherence of the opening section becomes especially pronounced when we contrast it with what follows. The second part of the film is structured around the incessant dissatisfaction of desire: it denies Diane (Naomi Watts) and the spectator any experience of Camilla (Laura Harring), her love object—and it emphasizes this failure visually. The first part of the film, in contrast, produces a scenario in which Diane, appearing as Betty, can enjoy the object. As we’ve seen in other Lynch films, this separation between the experience of desire and that of fantasy accounts for—and is accomplished by—dramatic changes in mise-en-scene, editing, and the overall character of the shots between the first and second parts of the film. 195.

This kind of disruption of the shot/reverse-shot sequence (which does not occur in the first part of the film) indicates on the level of the editing that these worlds—the worlds of fantasy and desire—are ontologically distinct. 196

Mulholland Drive represents an advance on Lost Highway because it emphasizes not only that fantasy offers a solution to the deadlock of desire but also that fantasy provides a way of staging an encounter with trauma and an authentic experience of loss that would be impossible without it. The film celebrates the fantasmatic dimension of Hollywood—its commitment to the exploration of fantasy. Because of their formal similarities, one cannot come to terms with Mulholland Drive without looking at in light of Lost Highway. The two are companion films: Lost Highway explores the structure of fantasy and desire for male subjectivity, and Mulholland Drive does so for female subjectivity. One might even claim that Mulholland Drive is a feminist version of Lost Highway. 196

[p. 252, note 5]: The subject cannot isolate its object because this object is not the goal of desire but the cause. Desire does not come into being in response to an identifiable object; instead, it emerges as lack. As Joan Copjec points out, “Desire is produced not as a striving for something but only as a striving for something else or something more. It stems from the feeling of our having been duped by language, cheated of something, not from our having been presented with a determinate object or goal for which we can aim. Desire has no content—it is for nothing—because language can deliver to us no incontrovertible truth, no positive goal.”

By placing the spectator in the same position as the desiring subject on the screen—and by immersing both in total uncertainty—Lynch seems to set up the first part of Mulholland Drive as a world of desire. 198

One eliminates the anxiety that the enigma of the Other’s desire produces by fantasizing a resolution that enigma, and this is exactly what Mulholland Drive indicates that Rita does. After she wanders the streets, Lynch shows Rita falling asleep on the ground outside an apartment complex, and the next morning she wakes up to a world that has become far less mysterious. 198

If Rita falls asleep tormented by the mystery of the Other’s desire, she awakens into a world that is much friendlier. In the apartment complex, a woman is conveniently leaving her apartment for an extended trip, and Rita procures a place to stay by sneaking into the apartment. Betty, the niece of this woman, arrives in Los Angeles as a fledgling actress. Though Betty discovers Rita in the apartment and realizes that Rita doesn’t even know here aunt, she befriends Rita and assists her in the quest to discover her identity. These events clearly seem to dinciate that the film has entered the terrain of Rita’s fantasy: the open apartment and Betty’s arrival function as wish fulfillments for Rita as a desiring subject. 199

Throughout the first part of the film, Betty assists Rita in tracking down the details of the accident that triggered her amnesia and in following up on the memory framents that come to her. All of Betty’s efforts to help Rita—and her eventual declaration of love—suggest that she is nothing but a fantasy object for Rita, a way for Rita to put a stop to the anxiety of her own desire. But as the second part of the film unfolds, it becomes apparent that the entire first part of the film has not been structured around Rita’s desire but rather around a fantasmatic resolution of the desire of Diane Selwyn (who is also played by Naomi Watts). Whereas it initially seems that Betty arrives as a fantasy figure for Rita, helping her to solve the enigma of her desire, the second part of the film reveals that, in fact, Rita has all along played the central role in the elaboration of Diane’s fantasy and Betty is actually Diane’s own ideal ego in this fantasy. As a mysterious, unknown object, Rita provides a way for Diane/Betty to escape her unbearable desire.

The fantasy relation between Betty and Rita is a reimagining of Diane’s failed relation—which we see only in the second part of the film—with the movie star Camilla Rhodes (who is also played by Laura Harring). Though we usually associate mysteriousness and uncertainty with the difficulty of desire, the enigma of Rita is far more bearable for Diane than the impossibility that haunts her relationship with Camilla. Diane’s fantasy transforms Camilla Rhodes, the impossible object, into Rita, the mysterious object. This transformation offers Diane an escape from the impossibility of the object-cause of desire. 200

Mulholland Drive leads us (through the use of mise-en-scene and editing) toward the error of seeing Rita as a figure of desire not simply to toy with our expectations but to reveal the extent to which fantasy determines our experience. 201

The film reveals that the province of fantasy extends much further—and its power is much greater—than even Lynch’s previous films had envisioned. 201

The disappearance and reappearance of these objects does not indicate anything magical at work, but simply that this part of the film operates according to the atemporal logic of desire. 201

The classical Hollywood film hides fantasy’s role in producing temporality by not depicting any moments bereft of fantasy—no moments of desire as such, in which neither fantasy nor temporality operates. In Mulholland Drive, on the other hand, we see Diane’s experience of pure desire in the second part of the film. As a subject of desire without any fantasmatic supplement, Diane experiences only the repetition of the drive. As Betty, the fantasy figure who allows Diane to escape this repetition, she experiences temporality. The point here is that we do not employ fantasy to escape from the horrors of time, but that we employ fantasy to construct time as a respite from the horrors of repetition. As Slavoj Zizek notes, “fantasy is the primordial form of narrative, […and] narrative as such emerges in order to resolve some fundamental antagonism by rearranging its terms into a temporal succession. It is thus the very form of narrative which bears witness to some repressed antagonism.” By providing a narrative and temporal structure through which we can have experiences, fantasy delivers us from the timeless repetition of the drive. 202

This sentence presumably provides all the information that Diane has about the breakup. It exists for her—and for us as spectators—as just a fragment of sense, a fragment unconnected to any coherent narrative of the relationship between Adam and his wife. But in the first part of the film, we have already seen the events that Adam’s statement alludes to. Diane creates a fantasmatic scenario surrounding this fragment of knowledge that renders it completely sensible. 203

In this way, fantasy offers subjects respite from the incoherence that plagues their experience. 203

Throughout the second part of the film, Diane remains within the deadlock of desire: she can not attain the elusive enjoyment that her object seems to embody, and she cannot cast the object aside and begin to look elsewhere. 204

In Diane’s fantasy, Betty and Rita not only become lovers, but Betty is also able to come to Rita’s rescue. Envisioning oneself as the rescuer of one’s love object is, of course, the ultimate fantasy scenario; the rescue wins the love of the love object by proving that the subject deserves this love. This what we see in the case of Betty and Rita. In the world of desire, Camilla Rhodes occupies a position of desire relative to Diane. But when Betty discovers her, Rita has no idea who she is, not even her name, and adopts the name “Rita” from a Gilda movie poster. She is completely helpless, stripped of her mastery by Diane’s fantasy. The attractiveness of fantasy stems from this ability to deliver the goods—to provide the subject with a narrative in which she can access the inaccessible object-cause of desire. 205

As a result, Diane’s fantasy strips Adam of his position of power and forces him to succumb to various rituals of humiliation. 205

Thus, the fantasy transforms Adam from a figure of mastery into a victim and a pawn. It both punishes him for standing in the way of Diane’s acces to Camilla Rhodes and removes him as an obstacle. Through Adam’s transformation, Lynch reveals the power of fantasy to clear the way to the object. 205

Here, Betty completely defies the naivete she exhibited until this point, showing herself to be a sexually experienced being. As a fantasmatic figure, she accomplishes the impossible: she is innocent, yet sexual; she is naïve, yet aware of how the world works; she is hopeful, yet not easily duped. In short, Betty occupies subject positions that are contradictory and mutually exclusive. This is only possible because she represents a fantasized version of Diane. The distortion of the fantasy allows Betty to be all things—the perfect ideal ego for Diane. 207

The objet petit a is the reaminder that the process of signification leaves behind, and as such, it always escapes the province of the signifier (and the name). In the fantasy, the name “Camilla Rhodes” comes to signify corruption and undeserved success. We first see this name attached to a picture that two members of the mob, the Castigliane brothers, show Adam Kesher. They insist that Adam cast this woman in his film, telling him repeatedly, “This is the girl.” Through this gesture, the fantasy accomplishes a double move: it tarnishes the acting success of the actual Camilla Rhodes by suggesting that mob influence procured her big break, allowing her to overstep more talented actors, and it impugns the unnamed woman whom Diane sees kissing Camilla Rhodes at a party (because she is the woman in the mobster’s photograph identified as “Camilla Rhodes”). At the same time, the actor who plays Camilla Rhodes in the second part of the film, Laura Harring, appears in the first part in an entirely different guise, as “Rita” As Rita, the desirable part of Camilla Rhodes—embodies by the actor Harring herself—persists in the fantasy, minus the undesirable part of her now linked to the other Camilla Rhodes. Lynch uses the same actor to play Camilla Rhodes in the second part of the film and Rita in the first part, but changes the name in order to illustrate fantasy’s attempt to deliver the impossible object in a pure form, free of any pathological taint. 208

The essential quality of fantasy is not simply its ability to deliver wish fulfillment. Its fundamental function consists in its ability to address desire on the most important level, its ability to figure (the illusion of) a successful sexual relationship. According to Lacan, the sexual relationship—or more precisely, the failure of it—represent the primary stumbling block in human relations, a stumbling block that results from our insertion into language. 208

Lost Highway depicts the failure of the sexual relation through Fred Madison (Bill Pullman) and his wife Renee (Patricia Arquette). Despite Fred’s many efforts to approach Renee’s enjoyment in the first part of that film, this enjoyment continually eludes him, leaving him haunted by his own failure to enjoy and by his failure to relate successfully to Renee. But as the fantasmatic figure of Peter Dayton (Balthatzar Getty), Fred is able to construct a narrative in which he can enjoy Alice (also played by Patricia Arquette), a fantasized version of Renee. On the terrain of fantasy, within the narrative that it constructs, the impossible sexual relationship becomes possible. This is what leads Slavoj Zizek to insist that “fantasy is ultimately always the fantasy of a successful sexual relationship.”

Lynch uses film to create rigid boundaries, and their very rigidity allows us to see in relief what occurs at the point they come together. This structural logic manifests itself in Mulholland Drive as well. Because Lynch avoids blending together the levels of fantasy and desire, he is also able to join them together in a way that reveals the traumatic real that exists at their point of intersection. 211

The first time Mulholland Drive depicts the real of this intersection occurs when Betty and Rita investigate Diane Selwyn’s apartment and discover Diane’s dead body lying on her bed. Because they are within the fantasy and perceiving through its lens, they cannot recognize the body (nor can we as spectators). Nonetheless, the very narrative structure of the fantasy—its mystery story—leads them to the fantasy’s point of origin, which is a traumatic point of non-sense that does not fit within the fantasy structure. After seeing the body, Betty and Rita quickly flee the apartment, and the film depicts their exit in a way that suggests that this encounter with the real has traumatized them and even thrown them out of joint. As we see them running out the front door of the apartment, the film not only uses slow motion, but it also blurs the image of both characters. We see several images of them on each frame, and consequently it looks as if Betty and Rita temporarily exist outside of themselves, as if the encounter with the real has disrupted their existence relative to time. The conventional filmic techniques—slow motion and multiply-exposed framed—here play a precise role within the narrative structure, suggesting a disruptive encounter with the real because their place relative to the events of the narrative. But this disruption merely presages the more significant ones that follow the dissolution of Diane’s fantasy. 211

Fully embracing her fantasy leads Betty/Diane right into the path of the real as it appears in the form of an encounter with her own dead body. As this scene suggests, Mulholland Drive is a panegyric to the existential and political possibilities of fantasy. 212

This is why at the moment Peter Dayton would finally connect with Alice in Lost Highway, Alice abruptly withdraws from the sex act and tells Peter, “You’ll never have me.” Peter approaches the experience of enjoyment through the fantasy structure, but he never quite arrives at it. The male fantasy holds back; it refuses to give itself over entirely to the object. A female fantasy, on the other hand, goes too far. It is a fantasy of giving oneself entirely to the love object. Thus, it does not stop short; the female fantasy depicts the achievement of the successful sexual relation. 212

After Rita uses the key to open the blue box, the camera moves into the opening in the top of the box and is subsumed by darkness inside. The film forces us to experience briefly the void that exists between fantasy and desire, but quickly we are thrust into the world of desire in which the woman who owns this apartment—Betty’s “aunt” in the fantasy—walks in the apartment by herself, with no trace of either Rita or Betty. 215

The Cowboy here represents another version of the Mystery Man (Robert Blake), who appears in Lost Highway. 215

the Cowboy enacts a superegoic function. 215

The difference between the Mystery Man and the Cowboy attests to the association of Lost Highway with the structure of male subjectivity and Mulholland Drive with the structure of female subjectivity. For the female subject, the superego lacks the ferocity that it attains in the case of the male subject. As Freud infamously puts it, “I cannot evade the notion (though I hesitate to give it expression) that for women the level of what is ethically normal is different from what it is in men. Their super-ego is never so inexorable, so impersonal, so independent of its emotional origins as we require it to be in men.” 216

The object is the subject’s correlate. The ontological consistency of the subject’s world depends on the existence of the impossible object, the object that resists integration into that world and yet sustains it with this resistance. As a result, Diane’s world of desire finally breaks apart when she succeeds in destroying her love object. At the end of the film, a blue key appears on the coffee table of Diane’s apartment, signaling to Diane that the killer whom she hired to kill Camilla has completed the job.

With the death of Camilla, the barrier between the world of desire and the world of fantasy collapses, and Diane’s fantasy life begins to intrude into her life of desire. The intrusion occurs in the form of fantasy figures from the first part of the film. 217

The film’s final word is not Lynch’s warning to the spectator to abandon the illusions of fantasy. It is not a call for quiet after all the rumblings of Diane’s fantasy. On the contrary, Mulholland Drive makes clear that it is only by insisting on fantasy to the end that one arrives at the experience of silence. This is the silence that exists between fantasy and desire—the traumatic silence of the real that the noise of everyday life always obscures. 218

Most fantasies—and especially the mass-produced fantasies of Hollywood—fail to be fantasmatic enough because they refuse to follow their own logic to its end point. They thus never arrive at the experience of silence that concludes Mulholland Drive. This is precisely the shortcoming that drives Theodor Adorno’s critique of Hollywood film. As he says in Minima Moralia, “It is not because they turn their back on washed-out existence that escape-films are so repugnant, but because they do not do so energetically enough, because they are themselves just as washed-out, because the satisfactions they fake coincide with the ignominy of reality, of denial.” For Adorno, Hollywood films do not fail—they are not ideological—because they go too far in the direction of fantasy but because they do not go far enough. 219

McGowan, Todd. “Finding Ourselves on a Lost Highway.” The Impossible
David Lynch. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. 154-176.

As Anne Jerslev rightly points out, “More than Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, Lost Highway takes the form of a radical departure from classical principles of coherence, unity and closure.” 155

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 Lost Highway, the videotape that appears on Fred and Renee’s front porch on the film’s second morning indicates the presence of some observing agency. Like the superego, whoever is observing their house with a video camera seems to be an intruder, an alien figure. 160

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 Alice (Patricia Arquette again, here a platinum blonde) is the mistress of Mr. Eddy (Robert Loggia)—not exactly a pleasant alternative. But we don’t turn to fantasy for happiness or for respite from reality; we turn to it for respite from the torments of our desire. 165

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, Alice, as a fantasy object, is knowable. In other words, in the fantasy one finds a solution to the desire of the Other. 168

Though Alice’s story upsets Peter, it also offers him a fantasized answer to the question, “what does the Other want?”; it allows him to conceive of the Other enjoying. The answer, not surprisingly, is the phallus, represented by Mr. Eddy, the site of power within this fantasy construction. The phallus functions to signify the Other’s desire. 169

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” Alice insofar as he doesn’t, insofar as Mr. Eddy’s prohibition bars him from completely enjoying her himself. 172

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, Lost Highway seems to have the most critical attitude toward fantasy. 176

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 Lost Highway, the controlling force in Lynch’s filmmaking. It is only the commitment to fantasy that reveals the absence of an alternative and the failure inherent in every success. Paradoxically, without the turn to fantasy, we would remain duped by the alternative possibility that fantasy promises and appears to provide. The turn to fantasy illustrates for us the identity of where we’re escaping from and where we’re escaping to, and by seeing their speculative identity, we can transform our relationship to the ruling symbolic structure. We can stop contenting ourselves with fantasizing an alternative world and instead work to reveal this alternative world that is already in our midst. 176

[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.

McGowan, Todd. “Introduction: The Bizarre Nature of Normality.” The Impossible David Lynch. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. 1-25.

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 Metz puts it, “it is always the other who is on the screen; as for me, I am there to look at him. I take no part in the perceived, on the contrary, I am all-perceiving. All-perceiving as one says all-powerful (this is the famous gift of ‘ubiquity’ the film gives its spectator); all-perceiving, too, because I am entirely on the side of the perceiving instance.” 3

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 Metz want to lay bare the symbolic structure of the cinema by confronting the imaginary mode in which we experience it. 7

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 Cannes and ignored in Los Angeles. 11

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 Hollywood films. If Godard is a filmmaker of distance, Lynch is a filmmaker of proximity. 12

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 Hollywood. By taking up mainstream filmmaking wholeheartedly, he reveals the radicality and perversity of the mainstream itself. He is too mainstream for the mainstream.

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 Missoula, Montana, his success in the Boy Scouts (becoming an Eagle Scout), his daily trips to the local Big Boy restaurant, and his delivering the Wall Street Journal to finance Eraserhead all evince his embodiment of the norm in a way that causes it to seem irregular or strange. 13

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 Kansas and the dream world of Oz. 18

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 Lost Highway, for example, contribute to the mise-en-scene that is meant to spur spectator desire. In Eraserhead, we see characters constitutively deprived of any enjoyment—that is, stuck in the dissatisfaction and lack that is desire—but even more, we as spectators experience our own sense of lack when confronted with an image that is largely dark and empty. These worlds of desire bombard the spectator with displays of absence. 19

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.