Parallel Montage

Parallel montage, as theorized by McGowan in the-real-gaze-film-theory-afte-todd-mcgowan, designates Griffith's editorial technique of cutting between two simultaneously unfolding lines of action — most paradigmatically the last-minute rescue — as a formal mechanism that operationalizes fantasmatic logic within cinematic structure. The technique does not merely create suspense as a neutral aesthetic effect; it actively manages the gaze by transforming what Lacan theorizes as the gaze's constitutive function — an impossible, traumatic absence, a Real-register stain in the visual field — into a knowable, controllable presence. By organizing the image around the fantasy of arrival-in-time, parallel montage promises that the threatening void (the gaze as objet a, as the Real that disrupts coherent vision) can be sutured and resolved. The cutting rhythm itself enacts the logic of fantasy ($◇a): it holds the barred subject in suspense before the object-cause of desire, only to deliver a fantasmatic resolution in which desire appears satisfied.

McGowan's argument ties this formal structure explicitly to ideology. The "cinema of integration" — Griffith's racist project of reconciling North and South, which required the dehumanization of Black subjects — is inseparable from this editorial logic. Parallel montage domesticates the traumatic Real by embedding it within a fantasy frame that converts radical impossibility into manageable tension-and-release. The formal racism of the cinema of integration is thus not an accidental content added onto a neutral technique; rather, the technique of parallel montage is itself the fantasmatic apparatus through which ideology reproduces itself at the level of filmic form.

Within the-real-gaze-film-theory-afte-todd-mcgowan, parallel montage occupies a pivotal position in McGowan's larger argument about how cinema relates to the gaze as objet petit a. The concept sits at the intersection of four canonical cross-references. Against the Lacanian account of the Gaze — which is structurally evanescent, traumatic, and impossible to fully capture — parallel montage is the technique by which mainstream cinema attempts precisely that capture, converting the Real-register disturbance of the gaze into a manageable spectacle. In this sense it is a specification of how Fantasy operates cinematically: the formula $◇a here plays out in editorial time rather than in a static image, with the suspense-cut holding the barred subject in productive tension before a promised but perpetually deferred object-cause. The concept also directly articulates Desire to cinematic form — Griffith's editing "betrays an investment in the fantasmatic resolution of desire," meaning the technique does not represent desire but structurally enacts and manages it. Finally, parallel montage is McGowan's way of grounding Ideology at the level of technique rather than content: the fantasmatic logic of the cut is the material site where ideological interpellation happens, making this concept a critical counterpoint to how Hitchcock (elsewhere in the corpus) is read as a filmmaker who frustrates rather than delivers fantasmatic resolution.

The concept thus functions as a negative foil within McGowan's corpus argument: where Hitchcockian cinema (and the broader tradition McGowan defends) can be read as staging the encounter with the Real gaze, Griffith's parallel montage represents cinema's systematic avoidance of that encounter through fantasmatic suture. It is an extension and specification of the Fantasy and Gaze canonicals, applied to the level of cinematic syntax, and it opens the connection between editorial form and the concept of Jouissance-management — the idea that cinema's formal pleasures are organized around the regulation, not the release, of enjoyment.

The Real Gaze: Film Theory After LacanTodd McGowan · 2007 (p.162)

Parallel montage—or, more precisely, Griffith's particular development of parallel montage—betrays an investment in the fantasmatic resolution of desire.

The phrase "betrays an investment" is theoretically loaded because it signals an involuntary disclosure — the technique does not merely illustrate fantasmatic logic but symptomatically reveals an ideological commitment that cannot be openly stated. "Fantasmatic resolution of desire" is the precise Lacanian charge: it names the structural crime of closing down the constitutive lack (desire's engine) through a fantasy-frame, directly invoking the $◇a formula and the Lacanian principle that desire sustained as desire must not be resolved.