Secondary literature 2007

The Impossible David Lynch

Todd McGowan

by The Impossible David Lynch

→ Concept index for this source

Synopsis

Todd McGowan's The Impossible David Lynch (Columbia University Press, 2007) advances a sustained Lacanian argument that David Lynch's cinema is uniquely structured around the formal separation of the realms of desire and fantasy — two registers that most mainstream films blend together seamlessly and that everyday experience conflates habitually. Where conventional Hollywood cinema offers spectators a fantasmatic resolution that is kept safely at a distance (allowing ideology to function without disturbance), Lynch's films fully immerse the spectator in the logic of fantasy, driving it to its traumatic endpoint and thereby exposing the structural relationship between fantasy and desire, the constitutive nature of lack, and the impossible status of the objet petit a. McGowan reads each major Lynch film — from Eraserhead through Mulholland Drive — as a formal experiment in separating these registers: each film constructs a "world of desire" organized around absence, inaccessibility, and the enigma of the Other's desire, and a contrasting "world of fantasy" in which the impossible object appears to be accessed, only for this access to reveal the traumatic real at fantasy's core. The argument is simultaneously a theory of ideology (fantasy's ideological function depends on its abbreviated deployment), a theory of the subject (castration, the lamella, the sacrificial logic of entry into the symbolic), and an ethics: by following fantasy to its endpoint, Lynch's films practice what McGowan calls an "ethics of fantasy," in which the subject's full commitment to its private fantasy — its willingness to endure humiliation before the Other's look — constitutes the only authentic ethical stance available. The book ultimately proposes that Lynch's cinema enacts a Hegelian-Lacanian "speculative identity" between the ideal and the nightmarish, between the social reality and its fantasmatic underside, forcing the spectator into a recognition that shatters the comfortable ideological distance that most cinema preserves.

Distinctive contribution

McGowan's book does something that no other single work in the Lacanian film-theory corpus accomplishes in quite the same way: it takes the Lacanian distinction between desire and fantasy as a structural principle of formal film analysis and applies it systematically across an entire directorial corpus. Where Žižek's essays on Lynch (collected in The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime) are suggestive but occasional, and where Chion's monograph on Lynch is primarily descriptive and phenomenological, McGowan constructs a unified theoretical apparatus — the formal separation of "worlds of desire" and "worlds of fantasy" as a cinematic achievement — and demonstrates its explanatory power film by film. This allows him to rescue apparently "failed" or "incoherent" Lynch films (Dune, Fire Walk with Me, Lost Highway) by showing that what critics experience as narrative dysfunction is in fact structurally necessary: the incoherence is the point, registering the traumatic real that fantasy's separation from desire makes legible.

A second distinctive contribution is McGowan's elaboration of an "ethics of fantasy" — a position largely absent from the Lacanian theoretical literature, which has predominantly aligned ethics either with desire (Lacan's Seminar VII: "do not give ground relative to your desire") or with the drive (Žižek's ethics of the act). McGowan argues, through close reading of The Straight Story in particular, that the full commitment to one's fantasy — enduring the humiliation of the Other's look, refusing to accommodate the Other's recognition — constitutes an ethical stance that goes beyond both the ethics of desire and the ideological function of fantasy as such. This revaluation of fantasy, refusing both the standard Marxist-ideological critique (fantasy as mystification) and the psychoanalytic denigration (fantasy as infantile wish-fulfillment), is the book's most original theoretical move. By linking this ethics to Kant's separation of the theoretical and practical realms, and then showing how Lynch — unlike Kant — grasps the "speculative identity" of these realms (a move McGowan attributes to Hegel), the conclusion situates Lynch's cinema within a major tradition of philosophical idealism while giving it a distinctively Lacanian inflection.

Main themes

The structural separation of desire and fantasy as Lynch's defining cinematic achievement
Fantasy's dual function: ideological mystification and revelatory exposure of constitutive loss
The ethics of fantasy: full commitment to the private fantasy as the only authentic ethical stance
The impossible object (objet petit a) and what happens when cinema makes it appear
Speculative identity: the Hegelian recognition of the ideal and the nightmarish as ultimately identical
Jouissance, sacrifice, and capitalist production: the subject's loss of the lamella as the motor of both sexuality and economic productivity
The failure of the sexual relation and fantasy's attempt to construct its illusion
Feminine versus masculine fantasy structures and their cinematic forms
The superego as the agency of the law's obscene enjoyment commandment
Traversal of fantasy: following fantasy to its traumatic endpoint as the condition of encountering the Real

Chapter outline

Introduction: The Bizarre Nature of Normality — p.1-25
ONE: Sacrificing One's Head for an Eraser (Eraserhead) — p.26-48
TWO: The Integration of the Impossible Object in The Elephant Man — p.49-67
THREE: Dune and the Path to Salvation — p.68-89
FOUR: Fantasizing the Father in Blue Velvet — p.90-109
FIVE: The Absence of Desire in Wild at Heart — p.110-128
SIX: Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me and Identification with the Object — p.129-153
SEVEN: Finding Ourselves on a Lost Highway — p.154-176
EIGHT: The Ethics of Fantasizing in The Straight Story — p.177-193
NINE: Navigating Mulholland Drive, David Lynch's Panegyric to Hollywood — p.194-219
CONCLUSION: The Ethics of Fantasy — p.220-224

Chapter summaries

Introduction: The Bizarre Nature of Normality (p.1-25)

The introduction establishes McGowan's central theoretical and cinematic argument. Beginning from the problem of spectatorial distance — the way mainstream cinema creates an illusory proximity that is nonetheless always mediated, and that allows the spectator to avoid genuine transformation — McGowan situates Lynch against both classical Hollywood and the Brechtian/Godardian alternative. Where the Brechtian tradition seeks to foreground spectatorial alienation and thereby produce critical distance, Lynch takes the opposite path: rather than pulling back from fantasy, he immerses the spectator more completely in it, driving it to its traumatic endpoint. This, McGowan argues, is Lynch's distinctive achievement and his answer to the limitation of both dominant cinema and its radical critics.

The theoretical core of the introduction is a psychoanalytic account of the relationship between desire and fantasy. Drawing on Lacan, McGowan distinguishes the two registers: desire is organized around the perpetual absence of its object (the objet petit a), while fantasy provides an imaginary answer to desire's question, constructing a scenario in which the impossible object seems accessible. In most films — and in most everyday experience — these registers are blended together seamlessly, which is precisely what makes fantasy ideologically effective: the spectator never sees the full consequences of the fantasy, only a tantalizing taste of it. Lynch's films, by contrast, formally separate these registers into distinct 'worlds,' making their structural relationship visible. This separation allows Lynch to avoid the limitation of the typical Hollywood film (which abbreviates fantasy before it reaches its traumatic real) without falling into the Brechtian trap of simply refusing fantasy altogether.

McGowan also introduces the concept of 'speculative identity' — drawn from Hegel — as the key to Lynch's philosophical project. Lynch's films do not simply show that the idealized surface of social reality conceals a nightmarish underside; they reveal that these two faces are structurally identical, that the ideal and the obscene are two modes of the same fantasmatic operation. This recognition, forced on the spectator by the formal structure of Lynch's cinema, is what makes his films genuinely transformative in the Rilkean sense that opens the chapter.

Key concepts: Fantasy, Desire, Objet petit a, Speculative Identity, Gaze, Symbolic Order Notable examples: Christopher Nolan's Memento; Titanic (James Cameron); Godard's cinema; Extreme Makeover (TV series)

ONE: Sacrificing One's Head for an Eraser (Eraserhead) (p.26-48)

The chapter on Eraserhead develops the book's foundational theoretical apparatus through a reading of Lynch's first feature. McGowan argues that Eraserhead is explicitly concerned with the link between the subject's psychic dissatisfaction and the functioning of capitalist production — a link typically left implicit in Lynch's later work. The opening sequence, which crosscuts between Henry Spencer floating in space and a man in a cabin pulling levers as a spermlike substance issues from Henry's mouth, establishes what McGowan reads as the lamella (following Lacan's Seminar XI): the piece of living substance subtracted from the subject as it enters into language and the social order, and thereby becomes a sexed, lacking being. This loss is simultaneously the condition of subjectivity and the motor of capitalist production, which depends on the subject's continual sacrifice of enjoyment for the sake of productivity.

McGowan then traces the film's formal structure — the extreme darkness, absent reverse shots, temporal elongation, slow characterization — as a sustained cinematic rendering of the 'world of desire,' organized around lack and the absence of the object. Fantasy emerges not, as Freud suggested, simply as a response to dissatisfaction, but at the specific moment when the subject encounters a reminder in the Other of its own castration. Henry's fantasies about the Radiator Lady begin only after the baby's arrival makes his lack palpable. The fantasy sequence itself, in which Henry witnesses his own castration as the baby's head displaces his, illustrates fantasy's paradoxical truth-telling function: by narrating an atemporal, originary loss as if it were a datable event, fantasy lies — but this lie is the vehicle through which the subject glimpses what ordinary reality obscures.

The chapter concludes by reading Eraserhead's ending — Henry's embrace of the Radiator Lady, accompanied by the breakdown of industrial machinery — as a full commitment to fantasy that exposes both its liberating potential and its cost. Unlike the typical Hollywood resolution (exemplified by Pretty Woman), Lynch shows the consequences of fantasmatic fulfillment: the destruction of the baby, the collapse of the production apparatus, the shattering of social reality. This is what McGowan means by Lynch's 'full commitment' to fantasy — he refuses to hold fantasy at a distance and thus forces the spectator to confront what fantasy actually costs.

Key concepts: Fantasy, Jouissance, Lost Object, Castration, Surplus-jouissance, Symbolic Order Notable examples: Eraserhead (Lynch, 1977); Pretty Woman (Garry Marshall, 1990)

TWO: The Integration of the Impossible Object in The Elephant Man (p.49-67)

This chapter extends the argument from Eraserhead to The Elephant Man, which McGowan reads as a radicalization of the desire/fantasy split: where Eraserhead depicts two experiential registers (the bleak social world and the fantastical Radiator Lady scenes), The Elephant Man depicts two versions of social reality itself — one structured through desire and organized around the inaccessibility of the impossible object, and one structured through fantasy and organized around the apparent integration of that object. The transition between them constitutes the film's traumatic turn.

The first half of the film establishes John Merrick's body as the objet petit a — an object-cause of desire that functions only through its inaccessibility, marked by signs ('FREAKS,' 'No Entry') that simultaneously announce and prohibit enjoyment. The police closure of the freak show, Treves's failed attempt to see Merrick, the woman fleeing in tears — all these establish the impossible object as constitutively out of reach. When Merrick's body finally becomes visible to the young nurse (and to the spectator), the event registers as a trauma in the field of representation itself: the camera rushes forward, the nurse screams, and the visual field undergoes a radical reorganization. This is McGowan's central point: the appearance of the objet a within the representational field accomplishes the impossible, and in doing so it reveals the spectator's own desire — the distortion that desire introduces into the visual field from within.

The second half of the chapter analyses the film's 'positive' and 'negative' fantasy — the parallel between Madge Kendal's cultured patronage of Merrick and the night porter's exploitation, which Lynch links through a striking cut from Kendal to the drunken revelers reading the same newspaper article. Both figures transform Merrick into an object of curiosity; both modes of treatment are fantasmatic. This filmic indictment extends to the spectator: Lynch does not allow us to identify with the gentler position without implicating us in the obscenity of the other. The chapter ends by noting that the film reveals the cost of fantasmatic fulfillment for Treves, for Merrick, and for the spectator: when the impossible object is delivered, it loses the very impossibility that made it desirable.

Key concepts: Objet petit a, Fantasy, Desire, Gaze, Jouissance, Fetishistic Disavowal Notable examples: The Elephant Man (Lynch, 1980); Eraserhead (Lynch, 1977)

THREE: Dune and the Path to Salvation (p.68-89)

Against the critical consensus that Dune represents Lynch's capitulation to Hollywood and thus lies outside his authentic filmmaking project, McGowan argues that Dune is one of his most theoretically complex films. Its very compliance with classical Hollywood narrative structure — the complete fantasmatic resolution, the union of hero and love object, the triumph over evil — is precisely the point: Lynch constructs a film that goes further than any other in immersing the spectator in a world of pure fantasy, thereby exposing both the seductive power and the troubling consequences of fully inhabiting that world.

The chapter's key theoretical contribution is its reading of the spice on Arrakis as das Ding (the maternal Thing, following Lacan's Seminar VII): the substance of pure enjoyment that ordinarily remains excluded from reality but that, in the fantasmatic world of Dune, exists on the same plane as empirical objects. The chapter traces how the film's form — the destabilizing voice-over narration (Princess Irulan forgetting crucial information when discussing the spice), the proliferation of enjoyment in every corner of the filmic world, the figure of Baron Harkonnen as a body without limit (diseases bubbling to the surface, flying without constraint, public sexual excess) — constructs a world in which the barrier between internal and external has dissolved and the Thing circulates freely.

McGowan reads Paul's victory as the enactment of a complete fantasmatic resolution that collapses the boundary between the world of desire (Caladan) and the world of fantasy (Arrakis). The rain that Paul brings to the desert planet represents the importation of the external real into the fantasy: reality itself bends to accommodate the wish. But this very completeness is the film's critical gesture — by allowing the spectator no distance from the religious fundamentalism that accompanies Paul's victory (unlike Herbert's novel, which ironizes it), Lynch forces a confrontation with the enjoyment the fantasy produces and its costs. The speculative identity of revolutionary liberation and fundamentalist violence becomes visible precisely because the fantasy has been taken all the way.

Key concepts: Fantasy, Jouissance, Real, Objet petit a, Voice, Speculative Identity Notable examples: Dune (Lynch, 1984); Eraserhead (Lynch, 1977); The Elephant Man (Lynch, 1980)

FOUR: Fantasizing the Father in Blue Velvet (p.90-109)

The chapter on Blue Velvet argues that where the earlier films depict the division between desire and fantasy as a temporal movement (from one to the other), Blue Velvet presents this division as a spatial one: two simultaneously existing worlds — the excessively idealized public Lumberton and the nightmarish underworld of Frank Booth — that are both equally fantasmatic. Crucially, what everyone interprets as the film's real/fantasy opposition (the idyllic surface vs. the disturbing underside) is, for McGowan, a division within fantasy between its positive and negative poles. The truly structural opposition the film stages is between the fantasmatic realm (in both its daytime and nighttime modes) and the traumatic real of Dorothy Vallens's desire.

The theoretical center of the chapter is Dorothy's desire — a desire that is directionless, that answers 'nothing' to the question 'what do you want,' and that thereby functions as the objet a in its purest form: the impossible object as the void that desire circles without ever naming. McGowan reads Frank Booth's extreme behavior not as simple sadistic violence but as a fantasmatic response to Dorothy's undirected desire: Frank stages elaborate scenarios precisely in order to give her desire a direction, to domesticate the nothing that she desires into a nameable object. The father's role (embodied both by the idealized Tom Beaumont and by Frank himself as obscene paternal double) is to anchor fantasy and thereby manage the terror of feminine desire.

Jeffrey Beaumont's trajectory through the film is read as a progressive encounter with the impossible object: first from a safe voyeuristic distance, then in Dorothy's apartment without any fantasmatic frame (the moment of pure desire, when he says he doesn't know what he wants), then through Frank's underworld (which provides fantasmatic relief from Dorothy's terrifying desire), and finally in the traumatic scene where Dorothy appears naked in the idealized Lumberton world, tearing apart its fantasmatic consistency. The ending, McGowan argues, does not restore the fantasy but reveals its constitutive failure: Dorothy's voice singing 'Blue Velvet' over the idyllic image insists that her desire cannot be fully domesticated. What the film ultimately shows is that fantasy can never fully eclipse the remainder that desire leaves behind.

Key concepts: Fantasy, Desire, Objet petit a, The big Other, Name of the Father, Fetishistic Disavowal Notable examples: Blue Velvet (Lynch, 1986); The Elephant Man (Lynch, 1980)

FIVE: The Absence of Desire in Wild at Heart (p.110-128)

McGowan reads Wild at Heart as Lynch's most extreme experiment with the desire/fantasy structure: rather than separating the two realms sequentially or spatially, it presents a world in which the realm of desire has been entirely subsumed by the world of fantasy — a film, as McGowan memorably puts it, that is 'The Wizard of Oz without Kansas.' The world of desire is present only as an absent reference (Lula clicking her heels to no avail), and the film thus explores what results when jouissance proliferates unchecked, without the structural gap that makes fantasy operative.

The chapter's theoretical argument is that the film's excess — graphic violence, unrestrained sexuality, the pervasive presence of fire as an image of jouissance — does not represent an endorsement of unrestrained enjoyment but its critique. When the world is entirely saturated with the image of enjoyment, the structural function of fantasy (which depends on the gap between desire and its object) collapses. The result is suffocation rather than liberation: the maternal superego (Marietta) and the anal father of enjoyment (Bobby Peru) command the subject to enjoy without offering any means of doing so within a sustainable structure. Sailor and Lula fail not because they pursue fantasy too aggressively but because they do not commit to it fully enough — Sailor remains invested in phallic authority (the snakeskin jacket, the performance of non-castration for the Other), and Lula remains dependent on the Other's recognition.

The chapter ends with a reading of the film's happy ending: Glinda's appearance redefines 'wild at heart' not as the assertion of non-castration but as the full commitment to one's fantasy regardless of the Other's recognition. Sailor's apology to the gang (a symbolic acknowledgment of lack) enables the fantasy's realization. McGowan also reads the social dimension of the film's excess: the world is violent and threatening not because someone else is perverting the public sphere with their private fantasy, but because the characters' own failure to commit fully to fantasy infects the world around them. The private and the public are not separate.

Key concepts: Fantasy, Jouissance, Superego, Desire, Lack, Ethics of Psychoanalysis Notable examples: Wild at Heart (Lynch, 1990); The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939); Dune (Lynch, 1984)

SIX: Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me and Identification with the Object (p.129-153)

Fire Walk with Me is one of the book's most complex and theoretically rich chapters. McGowan argues that the film's notorious formal 'incoherence' — the disconnection between its two halves, the shift from the Deer Meadow investigation to the Twin Peaks story of Laura Palmer's final days — resolves once the two parts are understood as contrasting worlds of desire and fantasy. The first half (Deer Meadow, the investigation of Teresa Banks's murder) presents a world of desire stripped of all fantasmatic support: characters experience surfaces without depth, signifiers without meaning, alienation without relief. The second half presents the fantasy world — but, uniquely among Lynch's films, a fantasy world subjectivized from the perspective of the impossible object itself: Laura Palmer.

This formal choice — shooting the film from the perspective of the objet a — has profound theoretical consequences. The film exposes the dependence of phallic authority on the feminine enjoyment it simultaneously desires and destroys. BOB's drive to possess Laura ('I want to taste through your mouth') is shown to be structurally impossible: feminine enjoyment escapes phallic capture precisely because it is an enjoyment of the Other, not a possession that can be pinned down. The figure of the Man from Another Place is read as the detached libido — the body part subtracted by the signifier's cut on the body — who institutes the death drive in all the characters. BOB, as the embodiment of phallic authority, ultimately serves the Man from Another Place and the compulsion to return to loss.

The chapter's ethical climax is Laura Palmer's refusal of BOB's ring — her embrace of the death drive (figured by the ring's circular structure of absence) against phallic authority. This act, which is only possible once Laura acknowledges the lack in the Other (recognizing her father as BOB), constitutes what McGowan calls an ethical act in the Lacanian sense: the subject confronts the emptiness of the Other and, rather than seeking a new support, embraces that emptiness. The ring, which in the fantasy world represents the structure of fantasy itself — the circular return to loss — is also what Laura gives up, and this giving up is her act. McGowan also develops a reading of the speculative identity of the virgin and the whore in the figure of Laura: the film reveals that both fantasy figures occupy the same structural position, and that the enjoyment of either depends on the silent presence of the other.

Key concepts: Fantasy, Objet petit a, Jouissance, The Act, Feminine Sexuality, Name of the Father Notable examples: Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (Lynch, 1992); Blue Velvet (Lynch, 1986); Wild at Heart (Lynch, 1990)

SEVEN: Finding Ourselves on a Lost Highway (p.154-176)

Lost Highway is the film McGowan treats as the paradigm case of his central thesis about the narrative enactment of the desire-to-fantasy transition. The film's famous 'incoherence' — Fred Madison's inexplicable transformation into Pete Dayton in the middle of the narrative — is, McGowan argues, structurally necessary: the film formally enacts within its own narrative the psychic movement from desire (the torment of Renee's enigmatic desire, which Fred cannot fathom) to fantasy (the construction of an alternative scenario, Pete Dayton and Alice, in which the enigma is given a fantasmatic answer). This is why Lynch replaces one actor with another: the film itself becomes immersed in Fred's fantasy, and this immersion is so complete that it jolts the spectator out of the comfortable viewing position.

The theoretical architecture of the chapter draws on Lacan's account of fantasy as a response not to the unpleasantness of reality but to the torment of desire — specifically, the enigma of the Other's desire. Renee's desire is opaque to Fred not because she hides something but because desire is constitutively opaque; the subject of desire 'knows nothing of what it desires' (Lacan, Seminar X). The superego's appearance (the videotapes mysteriously deposited on the doorstep) is read as a consequence of Fred's abandonment of desire: the more the subject gives up desire for the law, the more the superego intensifies its demand. Law and desire collaborate to keep the subject fixed on the enigma of the Other's desire, which is precisely the ideological terrain.

Pete Dayton's fantasy world provides a structure (the father, Mr. Eddy, as the agent of prohibition) that gives Fred's enjoyment a direction — but the chapter traces how this fantasy also collapses when its object (Alice) becomes too proximate (the scene at Andy's house, where pornographic images of Alice play on the wall). The Mystery Man's insistence that there is no Alice (only Renee) forces Fred back to the world of desire, exposing the law's secret: the father's apparent plenitude of enjoyment was always already fantasmatic. The film's ending — Fred's repetition of the opening lines, 'Dick Laurent is dead' — enacts the compulsion to repeat that characterizes the drive, the structure of desire that fantasy can only temporarily interrupt but never resolve.

Key concepts: Fantasy, Desire, Superego, Repetition, Point de capiton, The big Other Notable examples: Lost Highway (Lynch, 1997); Blue Velvet (Lynch, 1986)

EIGHT: The Ethics of Fantasizing in The Straight Story (p.177-193)

This chapter is the theoretical pivot of the book's ethical argument. McGowan reads The Straight Story — Lynch's most apparently 'normal' and 'sincere' film — as in fact his most radical statement about the ethics of fantasy. The apparent absence of fantasmatic distortion in the film is itself an index of how thoroughly we are invested in the fantasy it presents: the American heartland as the site of authentic community. What the film does, in McGowan's reading, is demonstrate that fantasy is not an escape from reality but the very means by which we construct a meaningful reality — and that Alvin Straight's total commitment to his fantasy (traveling hundreds of miles on a lawnmower, against all apparent possibility) has a direct effect on the world he inhabits and perceives.

The theoretical frame shifts here from the Lacanian account of fantasy's structure to its ethics. Drawing on Hegel's concept of the 'law of the heart' (the paranoid subject who sees only corruption in the public world because it fails to embody the subject's private vision), McGowan argues that The Straight Story enacts the opposite: an anti-paranoid film in which Alvin's commitment to his own fantasy means he does not envy the enjoyment of others or experience the public world as threatening. The envious subject — who perceives the Other's enjoyment as excessive and as a deprivation of its own — has given up on its own enjoyment and therefore projects the image of lost enjoyment onto the Other. Alvin, by contrast, is so absorbed in his fantasy that he passes over the Other's enjoyment without disturbance.

The chapter culminates in a reading of the humiliation that fantasy entails: when one is fully committed to a fantasy, one is maximally vulnerable to the Other's look, because the fantasy externalizes the innermost kernel of one's subjectivity. Alvin's refusal to justify or explain his journey to those who mock it ('Eat your dinner, missy') is his ethical gesture — he endures the Other's look without retreating from the fantasy to seek recognition. This is what McGowan means by the ethics of fantasy: not a fantasy content but a fantasmatic posture, a willingness to expose oneself to humiliation by remaining committed to what one values over the Other's recognition.

Key concepts: Fantasy, Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Jouissance, Identification, The big Other, Lack Notable examples: The Straight Story (Lynch, 1999); The Elephant Man (Lynch, 1980)

NINE: Navigating Mulholland Drive, David Lynch's Panegyric to Hollywood (p.194-219)

Mulholland Drive is treated as the culmination of Lynch's cinematic project and the fullest realization of McGowan's theoretical argument. The chapter argues that the film radicalizes the desire/fantasy split beyond any earlier Lynch film: unlike Lost Highway, which moves from desire to fantasy in sequence, Mulholland Drive inverts the conventional order — presenting the fantasy world first (the coherent, beautifully lit, narratively comprehensible first part featuring Betty and Rita) and the world of pure desire second (the temporally disordered, dissatisfying, bleak second part featuring Diane Selwyn). This inversion is not merely formal but philosophical: it reveals that temporality itself is a product of fantasy, not an intrinsic feature of experience. Desire, operating without fantasmatic supplement, moves only in the repetitive, atemporal compulsion of the drive.

McGowan develops two major theoretical arguments in this chapter. First, the film stages the failure of the sexual relation (Lacan's 'il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel') and fantasy's attempt to construct its illusion — not only between man and woman (as in Lost Highway) but between two women, which removes the standard Hollywood framework of heterosexual complementarity and exposes the structural impossibility more directly. Diane cannot reach Camilla's jouissance because it is an enjoyment of the Other, not a possession; Camilla stages her enjoyment for Diane precisely to sustain Diane's desire. Betty and Rita's relationship in the fantasy world enacts the resolution that is structurally impossible in the world of desire. Second, the film is associated with a specifically feminine fantasy structure — one that 'goes further' than the masculine fantasy of Lost Highway because the feminine superego (the Cowboy) is less ferocious than the masculine one (the Mystery Man), and because Diane, unlike Fred, cannot ultimately endure the position of pure desire and collapses into suicidal self-destruction.

The chapter concludes by reading the 'traversal of fantasy' in Mulholland Drive: the film drives fantasy all the way to its dissolution point, where fantasy's intersection with desire reveals the traumatic real (Diane's dead body discovered by Betty and Rita). Lacan's formula that 'there is no other entrance for the subject into the real than fantasy' is literalized by the film's structure. Lynch's 'panegyric to Hollywood' is not a celebration of Hollywood fantasy but an exposure of what Hollywood fantasy would look like if it were followed to its endpoint — and that endpoint is the silence and darkness into which Diane withdraws.

Key concepts: Fantasy, Desire, Real, Feminine Sexuality, Splitting of the Subject, Gaze Notable examples: Mulholland Drive (Lynch, 2001); Lost Highway (Lynch, 1997)

CONCLUSION: The Ethics of Fantasy (p.220-224)

The conclusion brings together the book's psychoanalytic and philosophical arguments by situating Lynch's ethics of fantasy in relation to Kant and Hegel. McGowan argues that Kant's Critique of Pure Reason — which exposes the incompleteness of social reality through the antinomies of reason (points at which reason arrives at two contradictory conclusions, testifying to reason's inability to transcend the limits of possible experience) — parallels Lynch's cinematic exposure of the deadlock of desire. But where Kant responds to the impasses of theoretical reason by recommending acceptance of reason's limits (an antifantasmatic move), Lynch goes further: by formally separating the realms of desire and fantasy, he shows — in a Hegelian move that Kant himself failed to make — that the fantasy world of practical reason (freedom, the ethical act) is the truth of theoretical reason, not merely an alternative to it.

The speculative identity of the two realms (desire and fantasy, theoretical and practical reason) is what distinguishes Lynch's cinema from both Hollywood ideology and Brechtian critique. Fantasy is not an escape from reality but the means by which reality is constituted; the ethics of fantasy consists in fully committing to this constitutive fiction, enduring the humiliation of the Other's look, and thereby accessing the traumatic real that fantasy both covers and reveals. The conclusion also distinguishes McGowan's position from Žižek's ethics of the drive and Lacan's ethics of desire, proposing fantasy as a third ethical register — one that is structurally distinct from both yet grounded in the same Lacanian analysis of the subject.

Key concepts: Fantasy, Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Speculative Identity, Real, The Act, Ideology Notable examples: Mulholland Drive (Lynch, 2001)

Main interlocutors

Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI (The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis)
Jacques Lacan, Seminar VII (The Ethics of Psychoanalysis)
Jacques Lacan, Seminar XX (Encore)
Jacques Lacan, Seminar XVII
Jacques Lacan, Seminar X (L'Angoisse)
Jacques Lacan, Seminar V
Jacques Lacan, Écrits
Slavoj Žižek, The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch's Lost Highway
Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies
Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason
Joan Copjec, Read My Desire
Joan Copjec, Imagine There's No Woman
Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier
Michel Chion, David Lynch
Martha Nochimson, The Passion of David Lynch
Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema
Bruce Fink, A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis

Position in the corpus

Within the Lacanian film-theory corpus, The Impossible David Lynch occupies a position adjacent to — and in productive dialogue with — Žižek's various writings on cinema (especially The Plague of Fantasies and The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime) and Joan Copjec's Read My Desire. Like Žižek, McGowan deploys Lacanian concepts as tools for ideological analysis of popular cinema, but where Žižek tends toward dispersed, essayistic interventions across many films and genres, McGowan offers sustained, book-length analysis of a single director's corpus. His systematic application of the desire/fantasy distinction as a formal-analytical category has more in common with the methodological rigor of Metz's apparatus theory (which he explicitly engages and critiques) than with Žižek's more rhetorical mode. Readers who have worked through Lacan's Seminar VII, XI, and XX will find the theoretical presuppositions well-handled, though McGowan does not presuppose this background and explains key concepts as they arise. The book is best read after Žižek's The Plague of Fantasies (for the theoretical framework of fantasy's ideological function) and alongside or after Copjec's Read My Desire (for the account of desire as caused rather than aimed and for the sexuation logic deployed in the Mulholland Drive chapter).\n\nWithin Lynch studies specifically, McGowan's book is the most theoretically sustained Lacanian reading of the corpus and an essential counterpoint to Chion's phenomenological approach and Nochimson's anti-fantasmatic reading. Readers coming from film studies will find the book unusually philosophically ambitious — the conclusion's engagement with Kant and Hegel places it in conversation with the broader tradition of German Idealism as read through Lacan. It should be read before or alongside Todd McGowan's subsequent theoretical work (The Real Gaze, Capitalism and Desire) and is an important secondary resource for understanding how Lacanian concepts (objet a, fantasy, jouissance, the Real, speculative identity) operate in film-analytic practice rather than purely in clinical or philosophical contexts.", "key_concepts": ["Fantasy", "Desire", "Objet petit a", "Jouissance", "Real", "Speculative Identity", "Symbolic Order"]