What do you think?
Rate this book
Film and Culture Series
The Impossible David Lynch
Todd McGowan launches a provocative exploration of weirdness and fantasy in David Lynch's groundbreaking oeuvre. He studies Lynch's talent for blending the bizarre and the normal to emphasize the odd nature of normality itself. Hollywood is often criticized for distorting reality and providing escapist fantasies, but in Lynch's movies, fantasy becomes a means through which the viewer is encouraged to build a revolutionary relationship with the world.
Considering the filmmaker's entire career, McGowan examines Lynch's play with fantasy and traces the political, cultural, and existential impact of his unique style. Each chapter discusses the idea of impossibility in one of Lynch's films, including the critically acclaimed Blue Velvet and The Elephant Man ; the densely plotted Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive ; the cult favorite Eraserhead ; and the commercially unsuccessful Dune. McGowan engages with theorists from the "golden age" of film studies (Christian Metz, Laura Mulvey, and Jean-Louis Baudry) and with the thought of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and Hegel. By using Lynch's weirdness as a point of departure, McGowan adds a new dimension to the field of auteur studies and reveals Lynch to be the source of a new and radical conception of fantasy.
Considering the filmmaker's entire career, McGowan examines Lynch's play with fantasy and traces the political, cultural, and existential impact of his unique style. Each chapter discusses the idea of impossibility in one of Lynch's films, including the critically acclaimed Blue Velvet and The Elephant Man ; the densely plotted Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive ; the cult favorite Eraserhead ; and the commercially unsuccessful Dune. McGowan engages with theorists from the "golden age" of film studies (Christian Metz, Laura Mulvey, and Jean-Louis Baudry) and with the thought of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and Hegel. By using Lynch's weirdness as a point of departure, McGowan adds a new dimension to the field of auteur studies and reveals Lynch to be the source of a new and radical conception of fantasy.
280 pages, Paperback
First published February 2, 2007
19 people are currently reading
683 people want to read
About the author
Todd McGowan
47 books207 followersTodd McGowan is Associate Professor of Film at the University of Vermont, US. He is the author of The Fictional Christopher Nolan (2012), Out of Time: Desire in Atemporal Cinema (2011), The Impossible David Lynch (2007), The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan (2007), and other books.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
September 7, 2008
Nowadays I just find it amusing to listen to/read someone's analysis of Lynch's films. In my opinion, reading David Foster Wallace's thoughts on what is truly "Lynchian" is probably good enough for me.
Mcgowan's book chronologically runs through an interpretation of (almost) every Lynch project, at least his full-length, studio pictures anyway. For the most part, it's a psychological reading of his films, largely from the academic perspective of a strict Lacanian, which makes it sound almost like a sub-par version of Zizek's essay on Lost Highway.
To be honest, I'm all for intellectual acrobats, sometimes, but this book just sounds irrelevant. Not to mention the fact that the whole unfulfilled desire/fantasy demarcation is very much apparent in most of Lynch's films. In example, with reference to Mulholland Drive, even though all of Lynch's films are open to myriad interpretations, it's pretty fucking obvious that the first half of the film is Diane's dream wish fulfillment of her relationship with Rita (of course there are even some holes in that), and the second part of the film is the cold reality in which she has been completely fucked over, thus her desire is unfulfilled. For an author to touch this ostensible dynamic up with a bunch of fodder from Lacan's seminars is just cheap film theory in my opinion. Aside from that, there are so many tiny, ambiguous details contained within Lynch's films, that they almost seem to evade any sort of theoretical interpretation.
I guess it's my own fault for reading this book in the first place. Such a shame too because the cover of this book is breathtaking. I mean, the title in itself is complete bullshit, the "Impossible David Lynch"? If you thought that he was such an impossible filmmaker, then why did you attempt an in depth study of his works?
Mcgowan's book chronologically runs through an interpretation of (almost) every Lynch project, at least his full-length, studio pictures anyway. For the most part, it's a psychological reading of his films, largely from the academic perspective of a strict Lacanian, which makes it sound almost like a sub-par version of Zizek's essay on Lost Highway.
To be honest, I'm all for intellectual acrobats, sometimes, but this book just sounds irrelevant. Not to mention the fact that the whole unfulfilled desire/fantasy demarcation is very much apparent in most of Lynch's films. In example, with reference to Mulholland Drive, even though all of Lynch's films are open to myriad interpretations, it's pretty fucking obvious that the first half of the film is Diane's dream wish fulfillment of her relationship with Rita (of course there are even some holes in that), and the second part of the film is the cold reality in which she has been completely fucked over, thus her desire is unfulfilled. For an author to touch this ostensible dynamic up with a bunch of fodder from Lacan's seminars is just cheap film theory in my opinion. Aside from that, there are so many tiny, ambiguous details contained within Lynch's films, that they almost seem to evade any sort of theoretical interpretation.
I guess it's my own fault for reading this book in the first place. Such a shame too because the cover of this book is breathtaking. I mean, the title in itself is complete bullshit, the "Impossible David Lynch"? If you thought that he was such an impossible filmmaker, then why did you attempt an in depth study of his works?
March 16, 2023
McGowan's book, in a nutshell, essentially serves to taper up what is inherently and so patently obvious about David Lynch's films: the divide between the different modes of desire frustrated or unfulfilled and fantasy's role in rendering life as meaningful, temporal, and capable of transcending limitations. He does this with quotes from psychoanalyst Lacan's seminars on almost every page. I will admit: this book is valuable to spend time in Lacan's world. If anything, Lacan is more a subject of the book than Lynch is. In other words, McGowan writes as if Lynch is a tool to understand Lacan. I ate this book's second half in one sitting which is astonishing for a book of dense academic prose. That does not mean I found his conclusions satisfying in respect to David Lynch. I am angry at this book for these reasons:
1) This is a 200 page book with 50 pages of notes about the most obvious visual characteristic of Lynch's films which to the competent filmgoer should stick out like a sore thumb while they're watching the movie, not afterward. Its voice is coming from a place where the average filmgoer is incompetent to interpret Lynch's films thus needs a theoretical framework to "make sense of it." The idea that the average filmgoer is incompetent is just not true - at this point, we've all been naturalized to interpret visual information and narrative because the screen and television is the primary way we receive information and have been since birth. The power of Lynch, at least for me, is that his images evoke rather than explain. McGowan tries to explain Lynch while somewhat failing to speak to their evocations.
2) McGowan's concluding chapter on Mulholland Drive, the most important chapter of any work of Lynch criticism, reverses the narrative he develops; for a conclusion I extremely disagree with. All chapters develop a narrative of Lynch's development as an artist in how to render desire (reality, animalistic and torturous) and fantasy (dreamy, convenient, contrived, constructed, the Hollywood-esque). His earlier films render desire with little to no fantasy - Eraserhead of course being a world of desire so bleak and ugly as to forsake fantasy altogether in order to cynically render reality in full. I find Eraserhead to be the basis of the weird and surreal "Lynchian." As David Lynch becomes a Hollywood fixture he experiences studio pressure to render his art more accessible and fantasmatic - box office friendly. As he progresses as an artist he begins to demonstrate how fantasy interacts with desire in devastating ways by separating the two distinctly. In the strongest chapter of the book, McGowan claims that Lost Highway is David Lynch at his most critical of fantasy because the film's narrative shows how fantasy's success only ends to remind us of the reality we're trying to escape from. Then we get to the chapter of Mulholland Drive and the disaster is immediately clear: its titled "Navigating Mulholland Drive, David Lynch's Panegyric to Hollywood." In my opinion, Mulholland Drive is the Anti-Panegyric to Hollywood. The film is, in my opinion, the strongest evisceration of Hollywood fantasy ever made, and McGowan takes the opposite opinion.
The film is about the sexual and professional failure of Diane Selwyn. In her failure, she constructs her ideal fantasy in the form of a Hollywood noir picture. Betty is Diane's ideal self who succeeds in Hollywood because of her stage presence being at once innocent and plucky, and sexually voracious as suits her career. Diane projects her lesbian lover Rita, rendered an amnesiac with a mysterious and sordid potentiality, and a certain vulnerability that keeps her dependent on Diane. Diane of course become’s fantasy’s ultimate representation - the hero. The first half is a conventional Hollywood picture of fantasy imminently watchable and coherent. Then, the narrative gets warped as the fantasy reaches its inevitable conclusion (career success, probable answers to Rita’s mysterious past, sexual fulfillment). A sense of loss pervades Diane's mind at the crucial turn of the film. The second half is famous and extreme in its Lynchian quality. The fantasy is fading. Diane's desire subsumes her; In reality, Rita is really Camilla Rhodes, the successful actress and the unattainable object of Diane's desire. Diane’s desire rotates a-temporally on several loops with extreme fears and hatred of everyone around her. Diane attempts to destroy Camilla as her unattainable object and succeeded. Only to find out that her fantasy is not destroyed with Camilla. As her fantasy begins to pervade in the corners of her terrible reality she commits suicide.
It is pretty clear to me that Diane commits suicide by fantasy - by fantasizing her life with Hollywood's conventions of material and sexual success it only underscores how unbearable her reality is in comparison. I argue that Mulholland Drive goes out to demonstrate that the particular fashion of Hollywood's fantasies are too conceivable - they make too much sense because they reflect our desires. Hollywood fantasies too often reflect the narratives and systems which reinforce themselves with logical endpoints. We know these fantasies antagonize our desire, and it proved to be Diane's undoing. The antagonizism is represented in Mulholland Drive's Bum behind the Winkie's Diner. The bum is Lynch's hyper-archetype of economic and social failure as capitalistic Hollywood portrays it. It is convenient that McGowan's argument never once mentions the Bum's role in the film. McGowan's argument is that, for Mulholland Drive, Hollywood does not go far enough in its fantasies. For him, film shows us "... the real in the obvious fakery of the fantasy." I cannot disagree more. For me, what renders a fantasy inert and dangerous is any notion of obviousness at all. Art is its most potent when its fantasies are rendered in mystery, awe, and contradictions which keeps us inventing new ways of looking at it and returning to it for new ideas.
For me, the irony of Lynch's approach to desire is that they're created in such a way where they become my fantasy. They are the images and turning points in the narrative that throw my interpretations off and keep me thinking and test my interpretive skills. I dream about Lynch's portrayals of desire. I fantasize about not only seeing desire through Lynch's eyes once more, but maybe creating my own images as well. We need fantasies that truly transcend our material sexual and animalistic desires, and I think Mulholland Drive is extremely serious about Hollywood's unwillingness to do so and why I wouldn't expect to see a new Lynch film ever again.
Ultimately, McGowan's book is emblematic of literary criticism's frustrating contradiction of interpreting art to static reason when it is living, breathing, and moving - that is why McGowan or any critic will never be the last voice on the matter of great art. The only thing we can do is just keep reading about art and talking about it with others.
1) This is a 200 page book with 50 pages of notes about the most obvious visual characteristic of Lynch's films which to the competent filmgoer should stick out like a sore thumb while they're watching the movie, not afterward. Its voice is coming from a place where the average filmgoer is incompetent to interpret Lynch's films thus needs a theoretical framework to "make sense of it." The idea that the average filmgoer is incompetent is just not true - at this point, we've all been naturalized to interpret visual information and narrative because the screen and television is the primary way we receive information and have been since birth. The power of Lynch, at least for me, is that his images evoke rather than explain. McGowan tries to explain Lynch while somewhat failing to speak to their evocations.
2) McGowan's concluding chapter on Mulholland Drive, the most important chapter of any work of Lynch criticism, reverses the narrative he develops; for a conclusion I extremely disagree with. All chapters develop a narrative of Lynch's development as an artist in how to render desire (reality, animalistic and torturous) and fantasy (dreamy, convenient, contrived, constructed, the Hollywood-esque). His earlier films render desire with little to no fantasy - Eraserhead of course being a world of desire so bleak and ugly as to forsake fantasy altogether in order to cynically render reality in full. I find Eraserhead to be the basis of the weird and surreal "Lynchian." As David Lynch becomes a Hollywood fixture he experiences studio pressure to render his art more accessible and fantasmatic - box office friendly. As he progresses as an artist he begins to demonstrate how fantasy interacts with desire in devastating ways by separating the two distinctly. In the strongest chapter of the book, McGowan claims that Lost Highway is David Lynch at his most critical of fantasy because the film's narrative shows how fantasy's success only ends to remind us of the reality we're trying to escape from. Then we get to the chapter of Mulholland Drive and the disaster is immediately clear: its titled "Navigating Mulholland Drive, David Lynch's Panegyric to Hollywood." In my opinion, Mulholland Drive is the Anti-Panegyric to Hollywood. The film is, in my opinion, the strongest evisceration of Hollywood fantasy ever made, and McGowan takes the opposite opinion.
The film is about the sexual and professional failure of Diane Selwyn. In her failure, she constructs her ideal fantasy in the form of a Hollywood noir picture. Betty is Diane's ideal self who succeeds in Hollywood because of her stage presence being at once innocent and plucky, and sexually voracious as suits her career. Diane projects her lesbian lover Rita, rendered an amnesiac with a mysterious and sordid potentiality, and a certain vulnerability that keeps her dependent on Diane. Diane of course become’s fantasy’s ultimate representation - the hero. The first half is a conventional Hollywood picture of fantasy imminently watchable and coherent. Then, the narrative gets warped as the fantasy reaches its inevitable conclusion (career success, probable answers to Rita’s mysterious past, sexual fulfillment). A sense of loss pervades Diane's mind at the crucial turn of the film. The second half is famous and extreme in its Lynchian quality. The fantasy is fading. Diane's desire subsumes her; In reality, Rita is really Camilla Rhodes, the successful actress and the unattainable object of Diane's desire. Diane’s desire rotates a-temporally on several loops with extreme fears and hatred of everyone around her. Diane attempts to destroy Camilla as her unattainable object and succeeded. Only to find out that her fantasy is not destroyed with Camilla. As her fantasy begins to pervade in the corners of her terrible reality she commits suicide.
It is pretty clear to me that Diane commits suicide by fantasy - by fantasizing her life with Hollywood's conventions of material and sexual success it only underscores how unbearable her reality is in comparison. I argue that Mulholland Drive goes out to demonstrate that the particular fashion of Hollywood's fantasies are too conceivable - they make too much sense because they reflect our desires. Hollywood fantasies too often reflect the narratives and systems which reinforce themselves with logical endpoints. We know these fantasies antagonize our desire, and it proved to be Diane's undoing. The antagonizism is represented in Mulholland Drive's Bum behind the Winkie's Diner. The bum is Lynch's hyper-archetype of economic and social failure as capitalistic Hollywood portrays it. It is convenient that McGowan's argument never once mentions the Bum's role in the film. McGowan's argument is that, for Mulholland Drive, Hollywood does not go far enough in its fantasies. For him, film shows us "... the real in the obvious fakery of the fantasy." I cannot disagree more. For me, what renders a fantasy inert and dangerous is any notion of obviousness at all. Art is its most potent when its fantasies are rendered in mystery, awe, and contradictions which keeps us inventing new ways of looking at it and returning to it for new ideas.
For me, the irony of Lynch's approach to desire is that they're created in such a way where they become my fantasy. They are the images and turning points in the narrative that throw my interpretations off and keep me thinking and test my interpretive skills. I dream about Lynch's portrayals of desire. I fantasize about not only seeing desire through Lynch's eyes once more, but maybe creating my own images as well. We need fantasies that truly transcend our material sexual and animalistic desires, and I think Mulholland Drive is extremely serious about Hollywood's unwillingness to do so and why I wouldn't expect to see a new Lynch film ever again.
Ultimately, McGowan's book is emblematic of literary criticism's frustrating contradiction of interpreting art to static reason when it is living, breathing, and moving - that is why McGowan or any critic will never be the last voice on the matter of great art. The only thing we can do is just keep reading about art and talking about it with others.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 24, 2021
This is an incredible book, or should I say, an incredible tool - for both making sense of Lynch's films and deploying Lacanian theory in a comprehensible way. Although the writing is quite dense, it's by no means a boring book. I took quite a while getting through it, but my pace accelerated as my understanding grew.
On the whole, The Impossible David Lynch is a well written and researched book, drawing from the likes of Adorno, Chion and Zizek, and addressing Marxist and feminist perspectives.
My only complaint, if I could call it one, is that the book was published prior to the release of Inland Empire. I'd love to see an updated edition with an essay on this final film.
If you've ever been perplexed by Lynch's films or are looking to understand Lacan, this is the book you need.
On the whole, The Impossible David Lynch is a well written and researched book, drawing from the likes of Adorno, Chion and Zizek, and addressing Marxist and feminist perspectives.
My only complaint, if I could call it one, is that the book was published prior to the release of Inland Empire. I'd love to see an updated edition with an essay on this final film.
If you've ever been perplexed by Lynch's films or are looking to understand Lacan, this is the book you need.
May 30, 2017
در هر فصل این کتاب که به فارسی با نام "سینمای دیوید لینچ" ترجمه شده است، فیلمهای این کارگردان هر کدام در فصلی جداگانه از دید روانشناختی بررسی شده است.
چیزی که در همه فیلمها جلوه دارد فانتزی در برابر میل است. جهان فانتزی و ترومای موجود در فانتزی که لینچ توصیه به مواجهه با آن دارد ، مایه اصلی این فیلمهاست.
چیزی که در همه فیلمها جلوه دارد فانتزی در برابر میل است. جهان فانتزی و ترومای موجود در فانتزی که لینچ توصیه به مواجهه با آن دارد ، مایه اصلی این فیلمهاست.
April 12, 2022
Ok ok this is my favourite Lacanian book. Maybe I have more than one favourite! My favourite Lynch films.... Wild at Heart, The Straight Story, Mulholland Drive, Twin Peaks, The Elephant Man, Lost Highway, Eraserhead... ok I like all the movies now after reading this book...
Embrace your fantasies. Make your life meaningful. Lack is an opportunity to do so. This is the ethical act of existing!
Enjoy!
Embrace your fantasies. Make your life meaningful. Lack is an opportunity to do so. This is the ethical act of existing!
Enjoy!
July 6, 2025
101- There are two states - desire and fantasy. These are separate because we desire (want) what we do not have, and we imagine this possession in the realm of fantasy, where we idealise the wanted ‘impossible object.’
Eraserhead - Henry lives a miserable, unfulfilled life in which he fantasises about a chipmunk-cheeked woman who lives in his radiator (so cliched)! He wishes to be with her and so sacrifices his unwanted ailing child in order to escape his reality.
Lynch suggests that when we sexually mature we lose the childlike state of indeterminacy our (‘lamella’)which then locks us into patterns of desire. In striving to attain flashes of our desires we submit to the (capitalist) miserablism and accept living out our wants through fantasy. It takes a huge destructive impetus to chase one’s desires to the extent where one can realise one’s fantasies.
The Elephant Man - Treves and Bytes both use Merrick for their own ends, one clearly nefarious and one seemingly benign. The spectator watches the reactions of people at the freak show and the medical institute, clamouring to see Merrick’s disfigurement, which Lynch withholds as long as possible. We are complicit.
When Merrick arrives as a character he lives his dream of normality by day, with the cost delivered at night by the repulsive Bytes. Striving to achieve one’s fantasy always has a cost. In his desire for complete acceptance (his fantasy), Merrick tries to sleep as others do, knowing he will suffocate. He achieved his fantasy at the ultimate cost to him.
Dune- In the world of Dune we see the collapse of the wall between fantasy and desire, as the two are fused in characters who have all they could ever want: the defirmed, Spice-exhaling navigators, who are so at one with the ultimate substance that it has become their very breath, and the unspeakable Baron Harkonen, who shamed sly fulfils every corrupt whim without mercy or even interest in those he destroys for pleasure. His foetid skin testified to his utter corruption and his flights literally put him above all others.
In the destruction of this macabre but exhilarating status quo, Paul Atriedes achieves a total victory, with all if his desires realised. As this man is celebrated as messiah, the pattern is set to repeat again.
Blue Velvet-The ‘absence’ of Jeffery’s father allows his son to enter the world of desire. Meeting Dorothy, the object of desire that he cannot get through to (because she desires nothing*), and Frank, a horrific individual whose sexual aggressiveness tries to make the same connection with Dorothy, he replaces one figure of control for another. Whereas his father kept the saccharine US small town fantasy putting away, Frank does the same in its nightmare equivalent.
When Dorothy crosses from the world of dark fantasy into the American idyll she produces a rupture that can only be mended at a surface level. She sits, reunited, with her son while the soundtrack recalls the persistence of Blue Velvet (a Frank association) through her tears. Meanwhile, a beautiful robin devours an insect.
*Her wish to return to her domestic world with her child and husband is what Lacan would consider the surrendering of her desire to the maternal role - a male determination. [Which may or may not be true.]
Wild at Heart-A world of tawdry satiation - complete fantasy - in which the two protagonists travel through a kind of Oz. They have each other and live a fantasy together, but with their mutual presence comes a lack of desire for a missing element. So they self-sabotage - Sailor through a dumb masculinity and Lulu through failing to break the maternal bond from her mother. Only when they reject these restraints and fully commit to their fantasy life can they fully enjoy it.
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me-In the series, Laura Palmer is the absence that so many desire and the secret of her desires is sketched in by those who thought they had an insight. Meanwhile, we seek a killer and a motive. In this movie prequel we follow Laura through the period prior to her murder.
The film is in two halves, with the first a nightmarish pre-tread of Laura’s murder. Lots of empty signifiers, red herrings, nonsense and coding for the sake of itself. Underlying all this is a void.
The we meet Laura, who is the projection screen for others’ desires. She is the frequent rape victim of Bob, representing the life drive, seeking experiences, in particular Laura’s ‘pleasure.’ Bob is at war with the death drive, as represented by the man from another place. Both of these live in the room.
Much of this is very conjectural, but YOU try making sense of it!
Lost Highway - Fred’s world is a bleak one, of undated desire for Renee because he cannot unlock her desire. A stranger with the powers of being in two places at once, and who functions as Fred’s superego, leads him to murder Renee.
Imprisoned, Fred becomes Peter, a heroic version of himself, in a much fuller, more realised and attractive world, peopled with oddly contradictory characters. Despite having more verisimilitude to reality, this is in fact the world of fantasy.
At the point where ‘Fred’ gets close to Renee ( now ‘Alice’)’s desire, the fantasy collapses and Peter reverts to being Fred. Notably, in his masculine desire he fails to fully commit to discovery, which renders Alice unknowable. The film tells us about the way fantasy impinges on our usual lives.
The Straight Story- In his madcap travel scheme, the incapacitated Alvin finds vitality and joy by committing himself fully to his journey. Because he allows no threats or humiliations to enter his perception, he is ultimately successful.
Mulholland Drive- Amnesiac Rita awakes into a world of fantasy and falls for Betty…only for the plot to about-face and reveal that all of this was in fact a fantasy dreamt up by Diane, for whom Betty is her idealised self and Rita an acquiescent version of her lost lover Camilla.
The whole first half is Diane’s wish fulfilment, the reasons for which are then displayed in the second half. This is why Betty is so contradictory- she embodies both ends of the spectrums that one may prefer at a given time, I.e. sexual naïveté and confidence. When the women discover a sliver of reality - a mis-recognised body, the fantasy, that has been all-embracing, shatters.
As the film concludes, Diane cannot stand the force of her (unrequited) desire and so she takes drastic action, at which point her fantasy world invades her reality and heightens her turmoil.
Conclusion- Learning from the world of fantasy allows us to make our own rules, rather than blindly accepting the rule of the superego.
Eraserhead - Henry lives a miserable, unfulfilled life in which he fantasises about a chipmunk-cheeked woman who lives in his radiator (so cliched)! He wishes to be with her and so sacrifices his unwanted ailing child in order to escape his reality.
Lynch suggests that when we sexually mature we lose the childlike state of indeterminacy our (‘lamella’)which then locks us into patterns of desire. In striving to attain flashes of our desires we submit to the (capitalist) miserablism and accept living out our wants through fantasy. It takes a huge destructive impetus to chase one’s desires to the extent where one can realise one’s fantasies.
The Elephant Man - Treves and Bytes both use Merrick for their own ends, one clearly nefarious and one seemingly benign. The spectator watches the reactions of people at the freak show and the medical institute, clamouring to see Merrick’s disfigurement, which Lynch withholds as long as possible. We are complicit.
When Merrick arrives as a character he lives his dream of normality by day, with the cost delivered at night by the repulsive Bytes. Striving to achieve one’s fantasy always has a cost. In his desire for complete acceptance (his fantasy), Merrick tries to sleep as others do, knowing he will suffocate. He achieved his fantasy at the ultimate cost to him.
Dune- In the world of Dune we see the collapse of the wall between fantasy and desire, as the two are fused in characters who have all they could ever want: the defirmed, Spice-exhaling navigators, who are so at one with the ultimate substance that it has become their very breath, and the unspeakable Baron Harkonen, who shamed sly fulfils every corrupt whim without mercy or even interest in those he destroys for pleasure. His foetid skin testified to his utter corruption and his flights literally put him above all others.
In the destruction of this macabre but exhilarating status quo, Paul Atriedes achieves a total victory, with all if his desires realised. As this man is celebrated as messiah, the pattern is set to repeat again.
Blue Velvet-The ‘absence’ of Jeffery’s father allows his son to enter the world of desire. Meeting Dorothy, the object of desire that he cannot get through to (because she desires nothing*), and Frank, a horrific individual whose sexual aggressiveness tries to make the same connection with Dorothy, he replaces one figure of control for another. Whereas his father kept the saccharine US small town fantasy putting away, Frank does the same in its nightmare equivalent.
When Dorothy crosses from the world of dark fantasy into the American idyll she produces a rupture that can only be mended at a surface level. She sits, reunited, with her son while the soundtrack recalls the persistence of Blue Velvet (a Frank association) through her tears. Meanwhile, a beautiful robin devours an insect.
*Her wish to return to her domestic world with her child and husband is what Lacan would consider the surrendering of her desire to the maternal role - a male determination. [Which may or may not be true.]
Wild at Heart-A world of tawdry satiation - complete fantasy - in which the two protagonists travel through a kind of Oz. They have each other and live a fantasy together, but with their mutual presence comes a lack of desire for a missing element. So they self-sabotage - Sailor through a dumb masculinity and Lulu through failing to break the maternal bond from her mother. Only when they reject these restraints and fully commit to their fantasy life can they fully enjoy it.
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me-In the series, Laura Palmer is the absence that so many desire and the secret of her desires is sketched in by those who thought they had an insight. Meanwhile, we seek a killer and a motive. In this movie prequel we follow Laura through the period prior to her murder.
The film is in two halves, with the first a nightmarish pre-tread of Laura’s murder. Lots of empty signifiers, red herrings, nonsense and coding for the sake of itself. Underlying all this is a void.
The we meet Laura, who is the projection screen for others’ desires. She is the frequent rape victim of Bob, representing the life drive, seeking experiences, in particular Laura’s ‘pleasure.’ Bob is at war with the death drive, as represented by the man from another place. Both of these live in the room.
Much of this is very conjectural, but YOU try making sense of it!
Lost Highway - Fred’s world is a bleak one, of undated desire for Renee because he cannot unlock her desire. A stranger with the powers of being in two places at once, and who functions as Fred’s superego, leads him to murder Renee.
Imprisoned, Fred becomes Peter, a heroic version of himself, in a much fuller, more realised and attractive world, peopled with oddly contradictory characters. Despite having more verisimilitude to reality, this is in fact the world of fantasy.
At the point where ‘Fred’ gets close to Renee ( now ‘Alice’)’s desire, the fantasy collapses and Peter reverts to being Fred. Notably, in his masculine desire he fails to fully commit to discovery, which renders Alice unknowable. The film tells us about the way fantasy impinges on our usual lives.
The Straight Story- In his madcap travel scheme, the incapacitated Alvin finds vitality and joy by committing himself fully to his journey. Because he allows no threats or humiliations to enter his perception, he is ultimately successful.
Mulholland Drive- Amnesiac Rita awakes into a world of fantasy and falls for Betty…only for the plot to about-face and reveal that all of this was in fact a fantasy dreamt up by Diane, for whom Betty is her idealised self and Rita an acquiescent version of her lost lover Camilla.
The whole first half is Diane’s wish fulfilment, the reasons for which are then displayed in the second half. This is why Betty is so contradictory- she embodies both ends of the spectrums that one may prefer at a given time, I.e. sexual naïveté and confidence. When the women discover a sliver of reality - a mis-recognised body, the fantasy, that has been all-embracing, shatters.
As the film concludes, Diane cannot stand the force of her (unrequited) desire and so she takes drastic action, at which point her fantasy world invades her reality and heightens her turmoil.
Conclusion- Learning from the world of fantasy allows us to make our own rules, rather than blindly accepting the rule of the superego.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 19, 2007
I've read parts of this book in another form (an article from a film journal) and was extremely impressed with the author's interpretation of Mulholland Dr. I can't wait to read further into it.
February 12, 2013
If you're a fan of David Lynch, then you must read this book - in a word it is a stunning piece of erudition and theoretical thinking. The best academic book on Lynch yet to published.
January 27, 2025
2019 Reading
Does fantasy have an ethical dimension? This is the question Todd McGowan explores in The impossible David Lynch, a psychoanalytic study of David Lynch and his film oeuvre.
In The impossible David Lynch, McGowan challenges his reader to reconsider the ways identification functions in film. McGowan writes, “The great achievement of his [Lynch] 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” (2). Here, McGowan challenges conventional interpretations of film, especially those interpretations that prize an over-investment in an incorrect understanding of identification. Despite what we might think, the latest Avengers movie, for example, fails to cultivate the sense of identification or proximity a Lynch film does even if it attempts to convince us otherwise. According to McGowan, most Hollywood films disavow what a Lynch film avows. Conventional cinematic fantasy isn’t fantasy at all. If anything, it’s an “ideological supplement” that hides the trauma of the symbolic order. By contrast, Lynch’s films force audiences to confront the trauma of the symbolic order. According to McGowan, “If we escape at all in Lynch’s cinema, we escape into the trauma that remains hidden but nonetheless structures the outside world” (24). We, therefore, escape into the trauma that defines us as subjects.
Therefore, instead of obscuring either our desire or the Other’s desire, fantasy in Lynch’s films lays bare those desires. This, I would argue, is one way to comprehend the ethical dimensions of fantasy in The impossible David Lynch. Fantasy constructs the conditions for desire to emerge, or as McGowan argues, “Desire does not exist prior to fantasy but emerges out of it” (18). This relationship is pertinent when thinking about Lynch because “He uses filmic fantasy to present desire in its immediacy and thereby allows us to see precisely how desire and fantasy interrelate” (18).
But it is also worth contemplating what is “impossible” about Lynch’s films. McGowan pivots from something Lacan says in Seminar XVII regarding the symbolic order and its inability to totalize our existence. McGowan writes, “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” (25). Thus, to watch a David Lynch film is to expose oneself to the failures of ideology, or as McGowan writes, “They [Lynch’s films] thus provide a fundamental challenge to the ruling symbolic structure, forcing us to see possibilities where we are used to see impossibilities” (25). The dominant symbolic order fights to persuade us of the impossibility of the impossible, but this is precisely what Lynch’s cinematic fantasy reveals.
By creating the conditions for the possibility of the impossible (i.e., the disruption of the symbolic order), fantasy asserts the totality of its ethical dimension. McGowan writes, “Fantasy allows us to discover our freedom only when we cease regarding it as an escape from our reality and begin to see it as more real than our reality” (223). The relationship between fantasy and desire is clearly visible once we take fantasy at its word, once we see the power of the “fantastic beyond,” once we play fantasy out.
Like all of McGowan’s books, The impossible David Lynch is lucid and readable. He expounds upon complex terminology in ways that teach readers about psychoanalysis while also developing an argument that pivot from psychoanalysis. Reading the entire book is not necessary, especially for readers unfamiliar with or disinterested in Lynch. With that said, the introduction and conclusion are worth reading and returning to. From what I gather, The impossible David Lynch is one of the few book-length, academic treatments of Lynch, and to see it done from a psychoanalytical persuasion was extremely satisfying.
***
2024 Reading
Returning to The impossible David Lynch for the first time in five years was a treat. I read the introduction in preparation for a podcast episode on Inland Empire, and what I found striking, something I missed the first time, is McGowan’s emphatic point that Lynch is surprisingly normal. He writes, “Ironically, the films [Lynch’s films] seem 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…He is too mainstream for the mainstream” (12). This idea supports McGowan’s overarching claims about fantasy, desire, viewership, and proximity. By sustaining a hyper-proximity between the audience and the film text, we experience fantasy in Lynch’s films “without respite” (25). That is to say, escape (in the immersive, cinematic sense) cannot exist in a Lynch film, and if it does, “we [the audience] escape into the trauma that remains hidden but nonetheless structures the outside world” (24).
For both McGowan and Lynch, normalcy is the “alternating experience of absence and excessive presence” (19). Within Lynch’s normalcy, he “offers the fantasmatic experience in order to facilitate this identification with what seems most distant from and foreign to us as spectators” (22). Unlike traditional Hollywood fare or even avante-garde efforts from figures like Godard, a David Lynch film refuses to allow the spectator to feel safe. As McGowan writes, “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” (25).
But our reward for this discomfort is a better understanding of what is possible. McGowan writes, “Fantasy allows us to discover our freedom only when we cease regarding it as an escape from our reality and begin to see it as more real than our reality” (223). With this understanding of fantasy in mind, the subject better sees “the gap in the structure of ideology” (223). The subject recognizes ideology for what it is: lacking and incomplete, just like the subject themselves.
***
2025 Reading
I only read Chapter 9 in preparation for a meeting about Mulholland Drive (2001).
David Lynch's 2001 film Mulholland Drive is divided into two distinct parts. Part 1 is the film's fantasy, and Part 2 is the film's reality. A conventional understanding of the differences between fantasy and reality might suggest that any fantasy sequences are incoherent when compared to moments of reality. McGowan suggests otherwise. He writes, "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 experiences coherent and meaningful" (195). In a sense, fantasy is more real than reality because "fantasy provides a way of staging an encounter with trauma and an authentic experience of loss that would be impossible without it" (196).
An important psychoanalytic concept for McGowan's chapter on Mulholland Drive is desire. Regarding desire, he writes, "Desire involves the confrontation with a fundamental uncertainty concerning the Other's desire...desire always involves not knowing, being confronted with a question that doesn't have an answer" (196-197). In the film's second part (i.e., reality), Diane (Naomi Watts) finds desire dissatisfying because Camilla (Laura Harring) is the Other whose desire is inaccessible. This is why the film's first part (i.e., fantasy) offers so much relief to Diane. In the fantasy, Lynch shows that "fantasy doesn't just resolve the mystery of desire, it creates a sense of mystery as well in order to obscure the necessary deadlock that animates all desire" (200). In Diane's fantasy, she becomes Betty and, by apparent happenstance, must save Camilla, who in her fantasy is an amnesiac named Rita. As McGowan suggests, "Desire confronts an impossibility," but fantasy transforms that "impossibility into mystery or uncertainty," thus rendering "the impossible possible" (200).
The film's narrative and chronological form complement McGowan's argument regarding fantasy and reality. In Diane's fantasy, the narrative possesses a clear, clean, and predictable coherency. In short, it feels like a traditional Hollywood film. By contrast, in the film's reality sequence, the narrative is disjointed and temporally disruptive. McGowan suggests, "By providing a narrative and temporal structure through which we can have experiences, fantasy delivers us from the timeless repetition of the drive," which is reality (202). "Fantasy," in short, "provides the background for our fragmented experience" (202). Therefore, there is something liberating about fantasy. When we indulge in fantasy, our desire has a coherency that it lacks in reality. This is because fantasy is a staging of desire within our control, even if that sense of control or mastery is unconscious.
Fantasy is liberating because desire is best understood as a "deadlock" (204). As McGowan suggests, "Diane...cannot attain the elusive enjoyment that her object seems to embody, and she cannot cast the object aside and begin to look elsewhere" (204). In reality, Diane lacks control and mastery, which is Camilla's exclusive purview. But in Diane's fantasy, Camilla "is completely helpless" and "stripped of her mastery" (205). Since Camilla "is completely helpless" in Diane's fantasy, the two can achieve a successful sexual relationship. The structural impasse that defines all relationships is absent in Diane's fantasy. In reality, complementarianism is impossible, but in fantasy, complementarianism seems possible because it [fantasy] "simply ignores the restrictions of the symbolic order. In fantasy, the laws of non-contradiction no longer holds" (209). However, the film's refusal to remain situated in fantasy illustrates how "no sexual relationship can succeed" (210). While fantasy is liberating, as McGowan suggests, it is also dangerous. He writes, "By convincing the subject that the sexual relationship can succeed, fantasy obscures the antagonism that haunts the functioning of the symbolic order" (210). Nevertheless, McGowan thinks that fantasy in Mulholland Drive has "positive political possibilities" since it takes "us to the point at which the ruling symbolic structure breaks down" (210). Unlike most fantasies in Hollywood films, in Mulholland Drive, Lynch pushes fantasy to a troubling but emancipatory place.
If deployed properly, fantasy pushes the subject to a deeper point of contradiction. By using fantasy the way he does in Mulholland Drive, Lynch illustrates how "fantasy opens the subject to an otherwise impossible experience. Subjects often retreat from desire into fantasy, but just as often, they retreat from fantasy rather than experience the sense of loss–the encounter with the emptiness of the impossible object–with which it confronts them" (218). Diane's fantasy cannot remain whole, unified, and consistent. In effect, it begins to deteriorate. After Betty and Rita have sex, Rita wakes from a trance and convinces Betty to go to Club Silencio. There, they see a performance defined by absence and inconsistency. This moment operates as a call suggesting that "the object in its absence" is far more enlivening than in its "presence" (213). This contradiction, which is to say a sense of loss, has emancipatory potential. McGowan writes, "The loss of the privileged object is the moment of the subject's birth and the moment that defines subjectivity itself. If we could sustain contact with this moment, we would free ourselves from the illusory promises of ideology and the blandishments of capitalist accumulation. We would see that enjoyment derives from not having the object rather than having and thus avoid the struggle to have more" (218-219). In Mulholland Drive, Diane arrives at this point of pure emancipatory loss "through the very fantasy that tries to escape it" (219). But Diane cannot handle the trauma of the object cause desire or objet petit a (i.e., Camilla). McGowan writes, "She sacrifices the object because she cannot endure the inescapable dissatisfaction that it produces" (217). This collapsing of desire and fantasy into the same filmic space explains the mania Diane experiences at the film's end. McGowan writes, "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" (217). In short, Diane commits suicide because this traumatic encounter was too much to endure.
Does fantasy have an ethical dimension? This is the question Todd McGowan explores in The impossible David Lynch, a psychoanalytic study of David Lynch and his film oeuvre.
In The impossible David Lynch, McGowan challenges his reader to reconsider the ways identification functions in film. McGowan writes, “The great achievement of his [Lynch] 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” (2). Here, McGowan challenges conventional interpretations of film, especially those interpretations that prize an over-investment in an incorrect understanding of identification. Despite what we might think, the latest Avengers movie, for example, fails to cultivate the sense of identification or proximity a Lynch film does even if it attempts to convince us otherwise. According to McGowan, most Hollywood films disavow what a Lynch film avows. Conventional cinematic fantasy isn’t fantasy at all. If anything, it’s an “ideological supplement” that hides the trauma of the symbolic order. By contrast, Lynch’s films force audiences to confront the trauma of the symbolic order. According to McGowan, “If we escape at all in Lynch’s cinema, we escape into the trauma that remains hidden but nonetheless structures the outside world” (24). We, therefore, escape into the trauma that defines us as subjects.
Therefore, instead of obscuring either our desire or the Other’s desire, fantasy in Lynch’s films lays bare those desires. This, I would argue, is one way to comprehend the ethical dimensions of fantasy in The impossible David Lynch. Fantasy constructs the conditions for desire to emerge, or as McGowan argues, “Desire does not exist prior to fantasy but emerges out of it” (18). This relationship is pertinent when thinking about Lynch because “He uses filmic fantasy to present desire in its immediacy and thereby allows us to see precisely how desire and fantasy interrelate” (18).
But it is also worth contemplating what is “impossible” about Lynch’s films. McGowan pivots from something Lacan says in Seminar XVII regarding the symbolic order and its inability to totalize our existence. McGowan writes, “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” (25). Thus, to watch a David Lynch film is to expose oneself to the failures of ideology, or as McGowan writes, “They [Lynch’s films] thus provide a fundamental challenge to the ruling symbolic structure, forcing us to see possibilities where we are used to see impossibilities” (25). The dominant symbolic order fights to persuade us of the impossibility of the impossible, but this is precisely what Lynch’s cinematic fantasy reveals.
By creating the conditions for the possibility of the impossible (i.e., the disruption of the symbolic order), fantasy asserts the totality of its ethical dimension. McGowan writes, “Fantasy allows us to discover our freedom only when we cease regarding it as an escape from our reality and begin to see it as more real than our reality” (223). The relationship between fantasy and desire is clearly visible once we take fantasy at its word, once we see the power of the “fantastic beyond,” once we play fantasy out.
Like all of McGowan’s books, The impossible David Lynch is lucid and readable. He expounds upon complex terminology in ways that teach readers about psychoanalysis while also developing an argument that pivot from psychoanalysis. Reading the entire book is not necessary, especially for readers unfamiliar with or disinterested in Lynch. With that said, the introduction and conclusion are worth reading and returning to. From what I gather, The impossible David Lynch is one of the few book-length, academic treatments of Lynch, and to see it done from a psychoanalytical persuasion was extremely satisfying.
***
2024 Reading
Returning to The impossible David Lynch for the first time in five years was a treat. I read the introduction in preparation for a podcast episode on Inland Empire, and what I found striking, something I missed the first time, is McGowan’s emphatic point that Lynch is surprisingly normal. He writes, “Ironically, the films [Lynch’s films] seem 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…He is too mainstream for the mainstream” (12). This idea supports McGowan’s overarching claims about fantasy, desire, viewership, and proximity. By sustaining a hyper-proximity between the audience and the film text, we experience fantasy in Lynch’s films “without respite” (25). That is to say, escape (in the immersive, cinematic sense) cannot exist in a Lynch film, and if it does, “we [the audience] escape into the trauma that remains hidden but nonetheless structures the outside world” (24).
For both McGowan and Lynch, normalcy is the “alternating experience of absence and excessive presence” (19). Within Lynch’s normalcy, he “offers the fantasmatic experience in order to facilitate this identification with what seems most distant from and foreign to us as spectators” (22). Unlike traditional Hollywood fare or even avante-garde efforts from figures like Godard, a David Lynch film refuses to allow the spectator to feel safe. As McGowan writes, “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” (25).
But our reward for this discomfort is a better understanding of what is possible. McGowan writes, “Fantasy allows us to discover our freedom only when we cease regarding it as an escape from our reality and begin to see it as more real than our reality” (223). With this understanding of fantasy in mind, the subject better sees “the gap in the structure of ideology” (223). The subject recognizes ideology for what it is: lacking and incomplete, just like the subject themselves.
***
2025 Reading
I only read Chapter 9 in preparation for a meeting about Mulholland Drive (2001).
David Lynch's 2001 film Mulholland Drive is divided into two distinct parts. Part 1 is the film's fantasy, and Part 2 is the film's reality. A conventional understanding of the differences between fantasy and reality might suggest that any fantasy sequences are incoherent when compared to moments of reality. McGowan suggests otherwise. He writes, "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 experiences coherent and meaningful" (195). In a sense, fantasy is more real than reality because "fantasy provides a way of staging an encounter with trauma and an authentic experience of loss that would be impossible without it" (196).
An important psychoanalytic concept for McGowan's chapter on Mulholland Drive is desire. Regarding desire, he writes, "Desire involves the confrontation with a fundamental uncertainty concerning the Other's desire...desire always involves not knowing, being confronted with a question that doesn't have an answer" (196-197). In the film's second part (i.e., reality), Diane (Naomi Watts) finds desire dissatisfying because Camilla (Laura Harring) is the Other whose desire is inaccessible. This is why the film's first part (i.e., fantasy) offers so much relief to Diane. In the fantasy, Lynch shows that "fantasy doesn't just resolve the mystery of desire, it creates a sense of mystery as well in order to obscure the necessary deadlock that animates all desire" (200). In Diane's fantasy, she becomes Betty and, by apparent happenstance, must save Camilla, who in her fantasy is an amnesiac named Rita. As McGowan suggests, "Desire confronts an impossibility," but fantasy transforms that "impossibility into mystery or uncertainty," thus rendering "the impossible possible" (200).
The film's narrative and chronological form complement McGowan's argument regarding fantasy and reality. In Diane's fantasy, the narrative possesses a clear, clean, and predictable coherency. In short, it feels like a traditional Hollywood film. By contrast, in the film's reality sequence, the narrative is disjointed and temporally disruptive. McGowan suggests, "By providing a narrative and temporal structure through which we can have experiences, fantasy delivers us from the timeless repetition of the drive," which is reality (202). "Fantasy," in short, "provides the background for our fragmented experience" (202). Therefore, there is something liberating about fantasy. When we indulge in fantasy, our desire has a coherency that it lacks in reality. This is because fantasy is a staging of desire within our control, even if that sense of control or mastery is unconscious.
Fantasy is liberating because desire is best understood as a "deadlock" (204). As McGowan suggests, "Diane...cannot attain the elusive enjoyment that her object seems to embody, and she cannot cast the object aside and begin to look elsewhere" (204). In reality, Diane lacks control and mastery, which is Camilla's exclusive purview. But in Diane's fantasy, Camilla "is completely helpless" and "stripped of her mastery" (205). Since Camilla "is completely helpless" in Diane's fantasy, the two can achieve a successful sexual relationship. The structural impasse that defines all relationships is absent in Diane's fantasy. In reality, complementarianism is impossible, but in fantasy, complementarianism seems possible because it [fantasy] "simply ignores the restrictions of the symbolic order. In fantasy, the laws of non-contradiction no longer holds" (209). However, the film's refusal to remain situated in fantasy illustrates how "no sexual relationship can succeed" (210). While fantasy is liberating, as McGowan suggests, it is also dangerous. He writes, "By convincing the subject that the sexual relationship can succeed, fantasy obscures the antagonism that haunts the functioning of the symbolic order" (210). Nevertheless, McGowan thinks that fantasy in Mulholland Drive has "positive political possibilities" since it takes "us to the point at which the ruling symbolic structure breaks down" (210). Unlike most fantasies in Hollywood films, in Mulholland Drive, Lynch pushes fantasy to a troubling but emancipatory place.
If deployed properly, fantasy pushes the subject to a deeper point of contradiction. By using fantasy the way he does in Mulholland Drive, Lynch illustrates how "fantasy opens the subject to an otherwise impossible experience. Subjects often retreat from desire into fantasy, but just as often, they retreat from fantasy rather than experience the sense of loss–the encounter with the emptiness of the impossible object–with which it confronts them" (218). Diane's fantasy cannot remain whole, unified, and consistent. In effect, it begins to deteriorate. After Betty and Rita have sex, Rita wakes from a trance and convinces Betty to go to Club Silencio. There, they see a performance defined by absence and inconsistency. This moment operates as a call suggesting that "the object in its absence" is far more enlivening than in its "presence" (213). This contradiction, which is to say a sense of loss, has emancipatory potential. McGowan writes, "The loss of the privileged object is the moment of the subject's birth and the moment that defines subjectivity itself. If we could sustain contact with this moment, we would free ourselves from the illusory promises of ideology and the blandishments of capitalist accumulation. We would see that enjoyment derives from not having the object rather than having and thus avoid the struggle to have more" (218-219). In Mulholland Drive, Diane arrives at this point of pure emancipatory loss "through the very fantasy that tries to escape it" (219). But Diane cannot handle the trauma of the object cause desire or objet petit a (i.e., Camilla). McGowan writes, "She sacrifices the object because she cannot endure the inescapable dissatisfaction that it produces" (217). This collapsing of desire and fantasy into the same filmic space explains the mania Diane experiences at the film's end. McGowan writes, "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" (217). In short, Diane commits suicide because this traumatic encounter was too much to endure.
July 10, 2024
70
This was a fine book I don’t know. I love David Lynch and this book was interesting talking about how all of his films are made and flow narratively speaking around desire which makes sense with some but feels like it is reaching with others. The thesis as a whole is very interesting but my main problem with it is it quite literally tells you the same thing over and over for 224 pages. After awhile I just started to say I get it. I get it. And I don’t know why because this clearly isn’t the book to read if you are looking for this stuff but I wished they talked about the production of the movies more because a David Lynch production is fascinating to me and I feel like the book is at its strongest when it combines elements of his productions with all of this psychoanalytical mumbo jumbo about desire. There are some parts of this book that soar and there are others that are just painfully uninteresting which makes for quite a mixed experience. I don’t know if this sort of deep dive psychological stuff is for you then by all means read it. You’ll probably like it but if that is doggedly not your thing then stay far away from this. All in all a heady and fascinating psychological deep dive into why David Lynch’s movies might be the most normal movies ever that while extremely interesting can get repetitive after awhile. I’ll leave it at that for fear of repeating myself. On to the next one!!
This was a fine book I don’t know. I love David Lynch and this book was interesting talking about how all of his films are made and flow narratively speaking around desire which makes sense with some but feels like it is reaching with others. The thesis as a whole is very interesting but my main problem with it is it quite literally tells you the same thing over and over for 224 pages. After awhile I just started to say I get it. I get it. And I don’t know why because this clearly isn’t the book to read if you are looking for this stuff but I wished they talked about the production of the movies more because a David Lynch production is fascinating to me and I feel like the book is at its strongest when it combines elements of his productions with all of this psychoanalytical mumbo jumbo about desire. There are some parts of this book that soar and there are others that are just painfully uninteresting which makes for quite a mixed experience. I don’t know if this sort of deep dive psychological stuff is for you then by all means read it. You’ll probably like it but if that is doggedly not your thing then stay far away from this. All in all a heady and fascinating psychological deep dive into why David Lynch’s movies might be the most normal movies ever that while extremely interesting can get repetitive after awhile. I’ll leave it at that for fear of repeating myself. On to the next one!!
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 8, 2021
The most important thing to understand about David Lynch is that his films are about desire. In every single one of his films, this is represented as both positive and negative desire. Blue Velvet: Jeffrey and Sandy's All-American Romance vs Frank and Dorothy's underworld. Wild at Heart: Sailor and Lula's star-crossed lovers vs Lula's mother, her unhealthy desire for Sailor, and her assortment of killers. Mulholland Drive: desire for the Hollywood dream versus the dark desire of vanity and self-obsession. And so on etc. Todd McGowan identifies this central aspect of Lynch's films and his study is entirely about dissecting its presentation in each of Lynch's films leading up to Mulholland Drive. Most interesting are his analyses of Lynch's most thematically rich films, Wild at Heart and Blue Velvet. Reading this I also had the realization that if desire is at the centre of Lynch's work then his films are better understood as having non-linear circular structures rather than telling straightforward narratives from A to B. The apparent tonal flips in Lynch's work come from the film moving from the inner-circle (the sentimental heart of his movies) to the outer circle (everything in the real world that threatens it). By seeing his movies this way, their problems can be resolved in a way that finds further meaning.
August 17, 2017
This is quite a tough journey at times, the author prefers to write in an abstruse academic style that conceals meaning, and this is a great shame because there are some potentially great insights here. Even in relation to those most analysed of modern films, Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive, there was plenty of penetrating and original material.
The insistence on a Lacanian psychoanalytic approach straitjackets some of the analyses, unfortunately, it did not lend itself to a deconstruction of Fire walk with me for example, though a fundamental misunderstanding of some plot points might have been equally at fault. It is also entirely possible that my own fairly limited grasp of Lacan has hampered my understanding of the material.
Definitely a worthwhile read and on a par with Martha Nochimson's The Passion Of David Lynch. I would certainly be interested to read an updated version to include Inland Empire as that fits the desire versus fantasy polarity characteristic of Lynch's work as closely as all of the films discussed here.
It even made me want to give Dune another try...!
The insistence on a Lacanian psychoanalytic approach straitjackets some of the analyses, unfortunately, it did not lend itself to a deconstruction of Fire walk with me for example, though a fundamental misunderstanding of some plot points might have been equally at fault. It is also entirely possible that my own fairly limited grasp of Lacan has hampered my understanding of the material.
Definitely a worthwhile read and on a par with Martha Nochimson's The Passion Of David Lynch. I would certainly be interested to read an updated version to include Inland Empire as that fits the desire versus fantasy polarity characteristic of Lynch's work as closely as all of the films discussed here.
It even made me want to give Dune another try...!
August 1, 2025
En raison de son efficacité, et de l'objet d'étude en question, ça est peut-être emblématique d’un certain manque et d’une impossibilité au sein de la critique cinématographique et littéraire, et plus encore dans le savoir lui-même — du moins dans ses formations occidentales actuelles : systématise, contextualise, opérationnalise, réfère, configure, interprète et alloue. Déborde d’impuissance, met en évidence les limites du discours : ne crée ni ne fait naître. En outre, cela met peut-être en évidence comment le discours psychologique/médicinal et la tendance réductrice de ses diagnostics fonctionnent comme une barrière, dangereuse non pas dans le contexte clinique mais surtout comme un système de pensée qui infiltre le discours contemporain. Mais ça ne veut pas dire vraiment rien
December 10, 2025
3.5
This was such a fun way to go through all of David Lynch’s films— I think graduating left my academic brain craving some theory so this was really fulfilling, although a bit repetitive and obtuse at times.
This was such a fun way to go through all of David Lynch’s films— I think graduating left my academic brain craving some theory so this was really fulfilling, although a bit repetitive and obtuse at times.
May 30, 2024
hell yeah
March 20, 2010
preemptive review (as of page 100 or so): a great exploration of lynch's work from a particular psychological/philosophical perspective. chief observation: desire vs. fantasy. desire for the impossible and fantasy achieving the impossible. interesting reading thus far. i'll probably edit this when i've completed the book.
done. this was an immensely enjoyable read for me. it’s not for everyone, that’s for sure. if you like in-depth analysis and don’t mind spoilers for the films being dissected this MIGHT be for you. there is a stress on the differences and prioritizations of desire and fantasy as to how it structures one’s reality. it is informed by freud, lacan, hegel, heidegger, kant, and more. I would recommend that you watch all of david lynch’s films prior to reading this book as it will make the reading that much more enlightening/interesting. this is recommended reading for the die-hard david lynch aficionado and/or the film theorist with a psychoanalytical bent.
done. this was an immensely enjoyable read for me. it’s not for everyone, that’s for sure. if you like in-depth analysis and don’t mind spoilers for the films being dissected this MIGHT be for you. there is a stress on the differences and prioritizations of desire and fantasy as to how it structures one’s reality. it is informed by freud, lacan, hegel, heidegger, kant, and more. I would recommend that you watch all of david lynch’s films prior to reading this book as it will make the reading that much more enlightening/interesting. this is recommended reading for the die-hard david lynch aficionado and/or the film theorist with a psychoanalytical bent.
January 27, 2015
This fulfilled the "fun critical theory about auteur" slot in my reading schedule nicely.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews