Secondary literature 2007

The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan

Todd McGowan

by The Real Gaze_ Film Theory Afte

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Synopsis

Todd McGowan's The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan (SUNY Press, 2007) argues that Lacanian film theory has been systematically misdirected since its inception in the 1970s: by locating the gaze on the side of the spectator—following the mirror-stage essay and Althusserian interpellation—early theorists (Metz, Baudry, Mulvey) produced a politically motivated but conceptually impoverished account that missed Lacan's own mature conception of the gaze as objet petit a, an objective disturbance within the visual field rather than a subjective look of mastery. McGowan's corrective move is to reposition the gaze inside the filmic image itself, where it functions as a lost, impossible object that triggers desire, implicates the spectator, and exposes the constitutive incompleteness of ideology. On this basis, the book constructs a fourfold typology of cinematic modes—cinema of fantasy, cinema of desire, cinema of integration, and cinema of intersection—each defined by a distinct relation to the gaze: excessive presence, constitutive absence, ideological domestication, and traumatic collision respectively. Working through canonical and popular directors (Kubrick, Lee, Mann, Fellini, Truffaut, Godard, Varda, Welles, Denis, Howard, Spielberg, Griffith, Tarkovsky, Wenders, Resnais, Lynch), McGowan shows how each mode carries determinate political and ethical consequences, from the exposure of obscene surplus-enjoyment in Kubrick's fantasmatic cinema to the shattering of fantasmatic dependence on the Other in Lynch's cinema of intersection. The book's governing wager is that cinema's radicality—its capacity to challenge ideology and produce genuine freedom in the subject—depends not on Brechtian distanciation or critical vigilance but on the spectator's full submission to the filmic experience, which parallels the analytic session in its capacity to bring the subject into contact with the traumatic real. The answer McGowan gives to the central question of what cinema can do politically is therefore not exposure through critical reason but encounter through the unconscious structure of the gaze.

Distinctive contribution

What The Real Gaze does that no other book in the Lacanian-psychoanalytic film-theory corpus does in quite the same way is to perform a thorough internal critique of the tradition from within its own Lacanian vocabulary. McGowan does not simply update or supplement early Lacanian film theory; he demonstrates that the tradition was built on a systematic misreading of Lacan—specifically, the conflation of the mature Lacanian gaze (objet petit a, a real-order object) with the Imaginary gaze of the mirror stage. This single conceptual correction has cascading consequences: it reverses the political valence of the cinema's dreamlike absorption (from ideological danger to potential site of freedom), dissolves the assumption that critical distance is emancipatory, and opens a positive account of fantasy that neither simply condemns it as ideology's supplement nor naively celebrates it as resistance. The result is a far more nuanced political topology than either the early apparatus theorists or the post-theory cognitivist critics achieved.

The second distinctive contribution is the fourfold typology itself. Unlike Žižek's more essayistic interventions—which move fluidly across examples without sustained formal commitment—McGowan constructs an architecturally rigorous system in which each cinematic mode is defined by a specific structural relationship between desire, fantasy, and the gaze, and each is given both a theoretical chapter and several case-study chapters. The logic is explicitly dialectical: fantasy exposes excess but risks ideological recuperation; desire preserves the gaze as absence but risks feeding renewed fantasy; integration neutralizes both through their seamless blending; intersection alone achieves the traumatic encounter by staging their collision. This schema allows McGowan to cut across genre, national cinema, and historical period in ways that no purely historicist or genre-based account could, grouping Eisenstein with Kubrick, Truffaut with Rossellini, and Lynch with Tarkovsky on formal-structural rather than contextual grounds.

A third, less remarked contribution is the book's sustained engagement with the ethics of psychoanalysis (Seminar VII) as a framework for evaluating cinematic experience. McGowan mobilizes the Lacanian injunction "do not give ground relative to your desire" not merely as a formula for clinical practice but as a criterion for distinguishing between cinemas that reinforce ideological submission and those that force the subject toward freedom. The concept of traversing the fantasy—usually confined to clinical contexts—here becomes a principle of cinematic politics, explaining why the discomfort of the cinema of intersection is ethically superior to the pleasure of the cinema of integration. This application of clinical ethics to aesthetic politics is rare even in the broader Žižekian-Lacanian cultural-theory literature.

Main themes

The gaze as objet petit a: repositioning the gaze from subjective look to objective disturbance in the visual field
Fantasy as ideological supplement and potential site of subversion: the double political valence of cinematic fantasy
Desire's constitutive incompleteness: the impossibility of the lost object and its consequences for cinematic narration
The fourfold typology of cinema: fantasy, desire, integration, and intersection as distinct political-ethical modes
The ethics of psychoanalysis applied to spectatorship: submission to the filmic experience versus critical distanciation
Ideology, the big Other, and freedom: the encounter with the real as the basis of political resistance
Surplus-jouissance and symbolic authority: the obscene underside of power made visible through fantasmatic excess
The paternal function and its failure: Spielberg's cinema of integration as propagation of the fantasy of the living father
The sexual relationship and its constitutive impossibility: Lynch and Wenders revealing the failure at ideology's foundation
Hegelian dialectics of identity and difference: Tarkovsky, Welles, and the objet petit a as a banal rather than sublime object

Chapter outline

Introduction: From the Imaginary Look to the Real Gaze — p.1-21
Part 1: The Cinema of Fantasy — Fantasy and Showing Too Much (Chapters 1-2) — p.23-48
The Politics of Cinematic Fantasy (Chapter 3) and Early Explorations of Fantasy (Chapter 4) — p.49-62
The Coldness of Kubrick (Chapter 5) — p.57-62
Spike Lee's Fantasmatic Explosions (Chapter 6) — p.63-70
Michael Mann and the Ethics of Excess (Chapter 7) — p.71-76
The Bankruptcy of Fantasy in Fellini (Chapter 8) — p.77-80
Part 2: The Cinema of Desire — Desire and Not Showing Enough (Chapters 9-10) — p.83-96
The Politics of Cinematic Desire (Chapter 11) and The Impossible Object of the Nouvelle Vague (Chapter 12) — p.93-104
The Banality of Orson Welles (Chapters 13-14) — p.105-120
Political Desire in Italian Neorealism (Chapter 15) — p.121-126
Part 3: The Cinema of Integration — Chapters 16-22 — p.129-174
Part 4: The Cinema of Intersection — Theorizing the Real and The Politics of the Cinema of Intersection (Chapters 23-25) — p.177-196
The Overlapping Worlds of Andrei Tarkovsky (Chapter 26) — p.193-198
Alain Resnais between the Present and the Past (Chapters 27-28) — p.199-212
Wim Wenders and the Ethics of Fantasizing (Chapter 28) — p.209-216
The Sexual Relationship with David Lynch (Chapter 29) — p.217-224

Chapter summaries

Introduction: From the Imaginary Look to the Real Gaze (p.1-21)

The introduction performs two simultaneous moves: a historical reconstruction of early Lacanian film theory and a theoretical demolition of its foundations. McGowan traces the emergence of psychoanalytic film theory in the 1970s through its reliance on Lacan's mirror-stage essay, which, mediated by Althusser's theory of ideological interpellation, allowed theorists such as Metz, Baudry, and Mulvey to link cinematic spectatorship to the reproduction of ideology. The chapter argues that this tradition made a constitutive error: it located the gaze on the side of the spectator, treating it as the subject's mastering look over the passive filmic object. This conception, McGowan contends, has more in common with Nietzsche's will to power and Foucault's disciplinary gaze than with Lacan himself.

The theoretical correction McGowan introduces draws on Lacan's mature teaching, particularly Seminar XI, where the gaze is theorized as objet petit a—an objective, real-order disturbance within the visual field rather than the subject's look. As the objet petit a of the scopic drive, the gaze is a constitutively lost object that the subject separated itself from in order to become a desiring subject; it cannot be directly seen but only experienced as a gap or distortion within the field of vision. This repositioning has immediate consequences: the cinema is no longer primarily a vehicle for ideological seduction through imaginary misrecognition, but a site where the impossible object shows itself, implicating the spectator rather than empowering them.

The introduction also establishes the political stakes of this reorientation. If the early tradition saw the spectator's lack of critical distance as the cinema's chief danger, McGowan inverts this: it is precisely the spectator's dream-like submission—their inability to turn away—that allows the cinema to produce an encounter with the real that waking experience forecloses. The cinema is politically radical not despite but because of its proximity to the dream, and the book's project is to trace the various ways in which films deploy or domesticate this radical potential.

Key concepts: Gaze, Objet petit a, Mirror Stage, Interpellation, Ideology, Scopic Drive Notable examples: Charles Vidor's Gilda (1946); Lacan's Seminar XI on the gaze

Part 1: The Cinema of Fantasy — Fantasy and Showing Too Much (Chapters 1-2) (p.23-48)

The opening theoretical chapters of Part 1 establish psychoanalysis's concept of fantasy and its relationship to filmic form. McGowan defines fantasy not as a genre but as an imaginary scenario that fills in the constitutive gaps within ideology, transforming ontological impossibility (the gaze as irreducibly absent object-cause) into a merely spatial or temporal barrier. Fantasy is what allows the subject to relate to the lost object as if it were simply out of reach rather than structurally inaccessible. Every film, even a realist one, has a fantasmatic dimension insofar as its formal mediation of reality creates a distortion; the question is what a film does with this distortion.

The chapter on 'theoretical fantasizing' identifies the first great film theorists—Münsterberg, Eisenstein, Arnheim—as theorists of the cinema of fantasy avant la lettre, insofar as they all recognized that film follows the logic of primary process rather than the reality-testing of secondary process. For McGowan, this is a psychoanalytic insight about film's special relationship to unconscious fantasy: film makes public what fantasy ordinarily keeps private, allowing spectators to recognize excess that everyday life keeps hidden. Crucially, McGowan argues that cinema's ability to show excess is not simply a risk (as early apparatus theory maintained) but also cinema's unique radical potential. The distinction between progressive and regressive cinema turns not on the presence or absence of fantasy but on what a film does with the excess it depicts—whether it exposes the excess as a constitutive feature of the social order or recuperates it within an ideological frame.

Key concepts: Fantasy, Gaze, Objet petit a, Surplus-jouissance, Ideology, Excess Notable examples: Münsterberg, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study; Eisenstein's film theory; Agamben, State of Exception

The Politics of Cinematic Fantasy (Chapter 3) and Early Explorations of Fantasy (Chapter 4) (p.49-62)

Chapter 3 works out the political valence of fantasy in detail. Fantasy functions conservatively as a supplement to ideology, providing imaginary satisfactions (the lottery fantasy is McGowan's paradigm case) that deflect revolutionary impulses. But because ideology is constitutively incomplete—it operates at the level of the signifier and cannot account for what lies beyond signification—fantasy also exposes ideology's gaps. The chapter argues that cinema's publicization of fantasy gives it a double political valence: it can reinforce ideology by keeping its fantasmatic supplements hidden, or it can expose those supplements and thereby strip them of the power that comes from obscurity. The key political question for any film is therefore whether it renders fantasy visible or invisible.

Chapter 4 turns to Eisenstein and Chaplin as the founding practitioners of a politically engaged cinema of fantasy. McGowan reads Eisenstein's Odessa Steps sequence from Battleship Potemkin not through the lens of Marxist montage theory but as a fantasmatic distortion that makes the obscene enjoyment of military authority visible: the overlapped editing extends real time to reveal surplus violence that a realistic depiction would miss. Chaplin's excess, by contrast, is located in the mise-en-scène: the Tramp's body in Modern Times sticks out from the industrial setting as an embodiment of resistance to the logic of the machine. Both filmmakers, McGowan argues, use cinematic fantasy to expose the hidden enjoyment that subtends symbolic authority, establishing the two poles—editing and mise-en-scène—along which the cinema of fantasy will develop.

Key concepts: Fantasy, Ideology, Surplus-jouissance, Symbolic Order, Jouissance, Point de capiton Notable examples: Eisenstein, Battleship Potemkin (1925); Chaplin, Modern Times (1936)

The Coldness of Kubrick (Chapter 5) (p.57-62)

This chapter addresses the seeming paradox of Kubrick's reputation for cold, dehumanized filmmaking and McGowan's positioning of him within the cinema of fantasy. The argument turns on a reassessment of what fantasy is: not an emotional or affective experience but a structural one. Fantasy is, as McGowan (citing Seminar VII) insists, a structure that operates with mechanical coldness; affect is merely fantasy's outward disguise. Kubrick strips away the affective disguise and presents fantasy in its pure structural form, which is why his films feel cold—they are close to the fantasy structure itself rather than to its palatably emotional packaging.

The radicality of Kubrick's cinema lies in its systematic exposure of the obscene enjoyment that inhabits positions of symbolic authority. From the prison guard in A Clockwork Orange to Sergeant Hartman in Full Metal Jacket to HAL 9000 in 2001, Kubrick shows that authority figures enjoy their positions in ways they are not supposed to, and this enjoyment is the real basis of their power over subjects. The spectacular, over-the-top performances in Kubrick's films are the formal vehicle for this exposure: they make the stain of enjoyment visible in the very exercise of authority. The chapter reads Paths of Glory in particular detail, noting how the opulent setting of General Mireau's chateau reveals surplus enjoyment at the level of mise-en-scène, making visible what a realistic war film would hide.

Key concepts: Fantasy, Surplus-jouissance, Symbolic Order, Jouissance, Gaze, Symbolic Identity Notable examples: Kubrick, A Clockwork Orange (1971); Kubrick, Paths of Glory (1957); Kubrick, Dr. Strangelove (1964); Kubrick, Full Metal Jacket (1987); Kubrick, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968); Kubrick, Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

Spike Lee's Fantasmatic Explosions (Chapter 6) (p.63-70)

The chapter on Spike Lee extends the cinema of fantasy from the exposure of authority's obscene enjoyment (Kubrick) to the exposure of the racist, sexist, and paranoid fantasies that structure everyday social interaction. For McGowan, the standard critical complaint against Lee—that his films are formally excessive and lack discipline—is precisely the point: Lee uses formal excess (montage, anamorphic lenses, obtrusive music) to bring into visibility the fantasmatic excess that underlies social life but normally remains hidden.

McGowan offers two sustained readings. First, Bamboozled is read as a film that makes racist fantasies visible by depicting the pleasure that both black and white spectators derive from the minstrel show. The key moment is when white spectators look to black spectators' laughter as license for their own enjoyment: the film exposes how racist fantasy circulates through the social field even among subjects who consciously reject racism. Second, the montage sequences in Summer of Sam synchronized to The Who are read as moments where Lee forces spectators to confront their own enjoyment of paranoid violence—placing spectators in the uncomfortable position of enjoying the unjust assault on a character they identify with. Unlike Kubrick's films, which allow spectators some distance from the implications of the gaze, Lee's films make the spectator's own complicity unavoidable, which constitutes a more demanding and politically charged version of fantasmatic cinema.

Key concepts: Fantasy, Jouissance, Surplus-jouissance, Ideology, Gaze, Fetishistic Disavowal Notable examples: Lee, Bamboozled (2000); Lee, Summer of Sam (1999); Lee, Do the Right Thing (1989); Lee, 25th Hour (2002)

Michael Mann and the Ethics of Excess (Chapter 7) (p.71-76)

This chapter takes the cinema of fantasy in a different political direction by arguing that Mann uses cinematic excess not to expose the obscene enjoyment subtending ideology (as Kubrick and Lee do) but to make ethical subjectivity visible. Mann's heroes—Frank in Thief, McCauley in Heat, the subjects of The Insider and Ali—are defined by their excessive devotion to duty, a devotion that cannot be reduced to any pathological or contingent motivation. The paradox McGowan analyzes is that these heroes initially seem to pursue duty as a means to a fantasmatic end (escape, comfort, the American dream), but when duty and fantasy come into conflict, they invariably sacrifice the fantasy for the duty. This reveals, retroactively, that the fantasy was always a pretext for following duty rather than the other way around.

McGowan reads this structure through Kant's ethics of the categorical imperative, noting that Mann's heroes instantiate the Kantian moral law not through cold rationality but through fantasmatic excess: it is precisely their excessive attachment to duty—their willingness to go beyond any pathological consideration—that elevates them above the contingencies of the social order. The gaze in Mann's films appears not as the obscene underside of authority but as the distorting excess of ethical subjectivity itself. This makes Mann's cinema an important corrective to any reduction of fantasmatic cinema to ideology critique: fantasy can also be the medium through which genuine ethical commitment becomes visible.

Key concepts: Fantasy, Jouissance, Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Surplus-jouissance, Gaze, Symbolic Identity Notable examples: Mann, Thief (1981); Mann, Heat (1995); Mann, The Insider (1999); Mann, Ali (2001); Mann, Manhunter (1986)

The Bankruptcy of Fantasy in Fellini (Chapter 8) (p.77-80)

Fellini represents the dialectical endpoint of the cinema of fantasy: rather than exposing obscene enjoyment (Kubrick, Lee) or ethical excess (Mann), he exposes the fundamental vacuity of the fantasy structure itself. McGowan argues that Fellini's films immerse spectators in a world of total fantasmatic access—unlimited women, unlimited options, unlimited time—and then reveal that this total access produces not enjoyment but boredom. The key reading is of 8½, where Guido Anselmi's fantasmatic world of unrestricted possibility generates a paralysis of will: when everything is possible, nothing is worth doing. The film forces spectators to experience the same boredom that Anselmi experiences, and in doing so it exposes the fundamental deception of fantasy—that fantasy's promise of ultimate enjoyment is constitutively unfulfillable.

Satyricon extends this logic to the social level, depicting a world of constant excess in which boredom is the dominant mood. McGowan reads Fellini's formal strategy—the episodic structure, the refusal of narrative resolution, the baroque accumulation of detail—as itself a vehicle for this exposure: by following the logic of fantasy to its extreme, Fellini reveals that fantasmatic enjoyment is necessarily imaginary and futural, that actually obtaining the fantasized object produces nothing. This makes Fellini's cinema simultaneously the most extreme and the most self-critical version of the cinema of fantasy, a cinema that uses fantasy to free us from fantasy's power.

Key concepts: Fantasy, Jouissance, Lost Object, Desire, Surplus-jouissance, Real Notable examples: Fellini, 8½ (1963); Fellini, Satyricon (1969); Fellini, Amarcord

Part 2: The Cinema of Desire — Desire and Not Showing Enough (Chapters 9-10) (p.83-96)

Part 2 opens by theorizing desire in its 'pure' form—not as desire prior to all fantasmatic capture (which is impossible) but as the movement of desire when it is not supplemented by fantasy. The desiring subject emerges through submission to the symbolic order, which produces lack; desire seeks what the Other does not have, circling around the objet petit a without ever arriving at it. In the visual field, this means that desire concerns what is not visible, not what is. This gives cinema of desire its formal signature: rather than overwhelming the spectator with presence (like the cinema of fantasy), it sustains an absent, impossible object that motivates desire without satisfying it.

McGowan argues against the cognitivist account of filmic narration (Bordwell, Branigan, Brooks), which reduces filmic desire to the desire for a complete fabula—the desire to know all the facts of the story. This account misses the gaze: filmic narration withholds not only empirical information but also the gaze, an object that is constitutively unknowable rather than merely empirically withheld. No revelation, no denouement, can ever deliver the gaze as a present object. The chapter on theoretical desiring recasts Bazin and Kracauer—usually read as naïve realists—as the first theorists of the cinema of desire: Bazin's celebration of depth of field and ambiguity, his resistance to manipulative montage, is read as an insistence on sustaining the gaze as a fundamental absence within the image, resisting the fantasy of capturing the object of desire.

Key concepts: Desire, Gaze, Objet petit a, Lack, Cinema of Desire, Signifier Notable examples: Bazin, André (realist film theory); Kracauer, Siegfried; Metz, Film Language; Branigan, Narrative Comprehension and Film

The Politics of Cinematic Desire (Chapter 11) and The Impossible Object of the Nouvelle Vague (Chapter 12) (p.93-104)

Chapter 11 draws out the inherent political radicality of desire: because desire seeks what the Other does not have—what is in the Other more than the Other—it cannot be fully captured by ideology, which always operates at the level of the signifier. The desiring subject is incipient revolt. Ideology can interpellate subjects, but it cannot satisfy their desire; what it cannot provide is precisely what desire continues to seek. This constitutive resistance to the social order gives the cinema of desire its political edge: by sustaining the impossibility of the object, it keeps subjects in the position of desiring subjects who recognize, at some level, that ideology cannot deliver what it promises.

Chapter 12 turns to the French nouvelle vague as the exemplary cinema of desire. McGowan argues that the nouvelle vague's formal choices—its emphasis on contingency over structured story, its refusal of narrative closure, its deemphasis on causality—are not merely stylistic experiments but structural strategies for sustaining the gaze as an impossible object. Story itself, even when it ends in failure, suggests that the object of desire is a possible object; the nouvelle vague resists this implication by denying spectators the fantasy of a possible path to the object. Truffaut's Les Quatre Cents Coups, Godard's early films, and Varda's Cléo de 5 à 7 are each read as formal enactments of desire's fundamental incompatibility with the social order. The chapter's most sustained reading is of Cléo: Cléo's long-awaited encounter with her doctor fails to deliver recognition, and this failure—rather than producing despair—liberates her from her dependence on the Other's gaze.

Key concepts: Desire, Cinema of Desire, Gaze, Objet petit a, Lack, The big Other Notable examples: Truffaut, Les Quatre Cents Coups (1959); Godard, À Bout de souffle (1960); Varda, Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962)

The Banality of Orson Welles (Chapters 13-14) (p.105-120)

McGowan reads Welles as enacting a Hegelian correction of the Kantian logic of the nouvelle vague. The nouvelle vague sustains the gaze as a transcendent, impossibly absent object—an approach that, like Kant's Transcendental Dialectic, keeps the beyond sacrosanct by demonstrating its inaccessibility. But this risks feeding new fantasies about the object's future accessibility. Welles's response is to render the object present—not as a sublime, mysterious thing but as something utterly banal. Rosebud in Citizen Kane is not a hidden secret but a sled, a trivial childhood object. George Amberson's comeuppance is not a satisfying fantasy resolution but a hollow, witnessed-by-no-one humiliation. By materializing the object, Welles reveals that it embodies nothing—that to attain the object of desire is to attain nothing.

The reading of Touch of Evil is particularly inventive. McGowan argues that this apparently excessive, gritty noir actually constructs a cinema of desire through the predictability of its noir conventions: by refusing spectators the experience of difference, the film reveals the fundamental monotony of desire when deprived of its fantasmatic supplement. The famous opening tracking shot performs this through its constant misalignment of camera and object—the car with the bomb perpetually escapes the frame—enacting the structure of desire, which encircles its object without ever arriving at it. Claire Denis then extends this project: whereas Welles exposes the emptiness of the object, Denis begins by establishing the seductive image of the enjoying Other and then systematically deflates it, revealing the lack and ennui that exist where the paranoid subject projects enjoyment.

Key concepts: Desire, Objet petit a, Lost Object, Gaze, Fantasy, Cinema of Desire Notable examples: Welles, Citizen Kane (1941); Welles, The Magnificent Ambersons (1942); Welles, Touch of Evil (1958); Denis, Chocolat (1988); Denis, J'ai pas sommeil (1994); Denis, S'en fout la mort (1990)

Political Desire in Italian Neorealism (Chapter 15) (p.121-126)

This chapter develops the political dimension latent in the cinema of desire by turning to Italian neorealism, which McGowan reads as a cinema that situates desire within the politicized context of historical struggle. Unlike the nouvelle vague or Welles, neorealism places desiring subjects within concrete conditions of oppression, showing how the social order generates the very dissatisfaction it cannot satisfy. But unlike Hollywood political films (which invariably offer a fantasmatic resolution), neorealism refuses political fantasy: each apparent resolution is undermined by a further complication, forcing the subject to continue desiring without the respite of a symbolic resolution.

McGowan reads Rossellini's Rome: Open City and De Sica's Bicycle Thieves as paradigmatic cases. In Bicycle Thieves, Antonio's investment in the individualist-capitalist fantasy—the belief that his bicycle, and the job it enables, is the key to resolving his situation—is systematically exposed by the film's conclusion, which inserts him back into the anonymous mass of subjects. The film's ending is not a celebration of this insertion but a demonstration that Antonio has not traversed the fantasy; he remains caught within it. Neorealism's political model is desire without fantasmatic resolution: the suggestion is that only subjects who sustain desire in its purity—refusing the symbolic authority's promise of resolution, including fascism's promise—can become genuinely politicized subjects.

Key concepts: Desire, Ideology, Fantasy, Lack, The big Other, Paternal Function Notable examples: Rossellini, Rome: Open City (1945); De Sica, Bicycle Thieves (1948); De Santis, Bitter Rice

Part 3: The Cinema of Integration — Chapters 16-22 (p.129-174)

Part 3 introduces what McGowan calls the 'cinema of integration'—the dominant global cinema, whose roots lie in classical Hollywood—which works ideologically by blending desire and fantasy in such a way that neither is recognizable in its pure form. The cinema of integration neither sustains the gaze as excess (fantasy) nor as absence (desire) but domesticates it, transforming the impossible objet petit a into an attainable empirical object within the visual field. The theoretical chapters of Part 3 diagnose this as a form of neurosis: the neurotic, unlike the 'normal' Freudian subject, cannot maintain a strict separation between the worlds of desire and fantasy, and the cinema of integration replicates and reinforces this neurotic structure by keeping the ideological work of fantasy hidden.

McGowan's three main case studies—Ron Howard, Steven Spielberg, and D.W. Griffith—each exemplify a distinct mechanism of domestication. Howard's films (Splash, Cocoon, A Beautiful Mind) represent the most basic form: they begin with an impossible object and then, through the course of the narrative, reveal that the impossible is achievable. A Beautiful Mind is read in particular detail: John Nash's mastery of his delusions transforms the gaze from a traumatic, disruptive stain in the visual field into a domesticated object that he can acknowledge without disturbance, eliminating the gaze's political potential—'the loss of the trauma of the gaze is at once the loss of the possibility of freedom.' Spielberg's films introduce a more sophisticated mechanism through the paternal function: by erecting the fantasy of the capable, redemptive father (always initially failed, then recovered—Jaws, Indiana Jones, Jurassic Park), Spielberg offers spectators the illusion of protection from the gaze. Griffith's contribution is structural: his use of parallel editing and suspense always frames the traumatic situation with the fantasy of a possible successful resolution, making the experience of desire palatable by ensuring that the dreaded outcome seems unlikely. In Birth of a Nation and Intolerance, this fantasmatic structure carries explicit political content—the desire of the racialized and feminized Other is the threat that the suspense must overcome and subjugate.

Key concepts: Cinema of Integration, Fantasy, Desire, Ideology, Paternal Function, Gaze, Fetishistic Disavowal, Interpellation Notable examples: Howard, A Beautiful Mind (2001); Howard, Cocoon (1985); Howard, Splash (1984); Spielberg, Jaws (1975); Spielberg, Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981); Spielberg, Jurassic Park (1993); Spielberg, Schindler's List (1993); Griffith, Birth of a Nation (1915); Griffith, Intolerance (1916); Griffith, Way Down East (1920); Fleming, The Wizard of Oz (1939); Zemeckis, Back to the Future (1985)

Part 4: The Cinema of Intersection — Theorizing the Real and The Politics of the Cinema of Intersection (Chapters 23-25) (p.177-196)

Part 4 introduces the final and most politically charged cinematic mode: the cinema of intersection, which brings together the separate worlds of desire and fantasy and sustains their separation long enough to allow them to collide. The theoretical chapters argue that neither the cinema of fantasy nor the cinema of desire can produce a direct encounter with the gaze: both maintain it at a distance, as either distorting excess or constitutive absence. The cinema of intersection achieves what the others cannot: by juxtaposing the two worlds and showing their collision, it makes the gaze appear as a real, impossible object at the very moment of its emergence and disappearance—the only moment when its traumatic impact can be felt.

McGowan's reading of Blue Velvet inaugurates this analysis: when Dorothy Vallens's naked and beaten body appears in the suburban idyll at the end of the film, her presence—coming from another world altogether—disrupts the fantasmatic structure of the scene. She is an embodiment of the gaze that does not fit within the picture, and her appearance forces every character (and spectator) to confront their investment in the fantasy that her presence shatters. The politics of this encounter are drawn out in chapter 25: the cinema of intersection produces subjects who can recognize that it is their own fantasy—not some secret buried within the Other—that fills in the Other's lack. This recognition is the basis for genuine political action, which McGowan distinguishes from the 'resignifying' of ideologically given identities (Butler): real political acts require shattering the framework that provides those identities, not reshuffling within it.

Key concepts: Cinema of Intersection, Gaze, Real, Fantasy, Desire, Objet petit a, Splitting of the Subject, Tuché Notable examples: Lynch, Blue Velvet (1986); Wizard of Oz (as proto-intersection); Back to the Future (as proto-intersection)

The Overlapping Worlds of Andrei Tarkovsky (Chapter 26) (p.193-198)

McGowan reads Tarkovsky as the most Hegelian of filmmakers within the cinema of intersection: his films stress identity within difference, revealing that the object motivating desire in the social world and the object at the center of fantasy are one and the same. This recognition—that one always escapes into precisely what one was fleeing—is the traumatic knowledge that the cinema of intersection uniquely enables. Tarkovsky strips away the fantasy of difference that allows desire to continue moving forward; once the subject sees that no new love object represents a genuine novelty (that the same objet petit a animates every object of desire), the object ceases to function as the lure of desire and becomes a traumatic real.

The backward-tracking shots that conclude Solaris and Nostalghia are analyzed as the formal embodiment of this logic: each begins in apparent separation (Kris returned to earth, Andrei back in Russia) and then slowly reveals that the world of desire and the world of fantasy are nested within each other rather than separate. In The Mirror, the casting of the same actress as both the narrator's mother and his estranged wife formally enacts the identity of fantasy-object and desire-object, forcing spectators to see how fantasy shapes what one 'discovers' in external reality. Tarkovsky's formal severity—his long takes, his refusal of conventional narrative movement—is read not as ascetic restraint but as the appropriate form for a cinema whose subject is the constancy of the objet petit a across different objects of desire.

Key concepts: Cinema of Intersection, Objet petit a, Fantasy, Desire, Real, Tuché, Repetition Notable examples: Tarkovsky, Solaris (1972); Tarkovsky, Nostalghia (1983); Tarkovsky, The Mirror (1975); Tarkovsky, Stalker (1979)

Alain Resnais between the Present and the Past (Chapters 27-28) (p.199-212)

The Resnais chapter extends the cinema of intersection into the domain of historical experience, arguing that history has the status of the objet petit a: it is an impossible object that cannot be recovered in the form in which it existed, and our approach to it is always already shaped by the perspective of the present. Historicizing is akin to fantasizing about origins—we invoke the past to authorize a present symbolic position—and the historical object, like the gaze, triggers desire precisely because it cannot be directly possessed.

McGowan's analysis of L'Année Dernière à Marienbad focuses on its formal structure: the film does not simply thematize historical unknowability but reconfigures the spectator's relationship to the historical object. The opening, in which the voiceover narration is discovered to be both nondiegetic and diegetic simultaneously (when the camera reaches the actor speaking it), collapses the absolute barrier between narration and narrative—a collapse that implicates the spectator's own desire in the constitution of the historical scene. The film's mise-en-scène (motionless characters, mechanical movements) enacts the absence of enjoyment that defines the world of pure desire, while the intrusion of fantasy (embodied in X's insistent narrative) demonstrates how fantasy fills in the gaps of the historical real. The chapter thus reads Resnais as showing that our relationship to history is always already the relationship of a fantasizing subject to an impossible object—and that the ethical response to history requires recognizing this implication rather than pretending to objective historical knowledge.

Key concepts: Cinema of Intersection, Fantasy, Desire, Real, Tuché, Trauma, The big Other Notable examples: Resnais, L'Année Dernière à Marienbad (1961); Resnais, Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959); Resnais, Night and Fog (1955)

Wim Wenders and the Ethics of Fantasizing (Chapter 28) (p.209-216)

The chapter on Wenders addresses the ethical dimension of fantasy within the cinema of intersection, arguing against the common assumption that fantasy is inherently unethical because it represents a retreat from the Other. McGowan's counterargument is that fantasy is the condition of possibility for a genuinely ethical encounter with the real dimension of the Other: it is only through imagining the Other in fantasy—outside of their symbolic identity, in the private real beyond public convention—that the subject acknowledges the Other's disruptive and threatening dimension, the part of the Other that does not fit within a prescribed symbolic role.

Der Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire) is read as a sustained exploration of the ethical limitation of pure desire and the ethical potential of fantasy. The angels occupy the position of pure desire: they have complete access to the Other at the level of the signifier but cannot touch the Other in the real. Their existence is ethically limited because it insulates them from the Other's impact—they can hear everything but feel nothing. When Damiel abandons immortality and becomes human, he enters the world of fantasy and thereby becomes vulnerable to Marion in a way that he never was as an angel. This vulnerability—being seen in the midst of one's private fantasy—is precisely the condition of genuine ethical encounter. Wenders thus shows that desire without fantasy is a form of emotional safety that forecloses the encounter with the real other; fantasy, despite its risks, is the path to ethical openness.

Key concepts: Fantasy, Desire, Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Real, Jouissance, Gaze, Signifier Notable examples: Wenders, Der Himmel über Berlin / Wings of Desire (1987); Sartre, Being and Nothingness (shame)

The Sexual Relationship with David Lynch (Chapter 29) (p.217-224)

The final case-study chapter reads Lynch's Lost Highway as the fullest realization of the cinema of intersection, through the lens of the Lacanian thesis that 'there is no sexual relationship.' McGowan argues that cinema's most fundamental ideological function is to provide a fantasmatic image of the successful sexual relationship—the illusion that romantic union can complete the subject. The cinema of intersection exposes this as impossible by depicting fantasy not in its abridged, ideologically comfortable form (where the barrier before the object stabilizes desire) but in its complete structure: the moment when the barrier is removed and the subject directly accesses the object.

In Lost Highway, the fantasy scenario that Fred Madison constructs (in which he becomes Peter Dayton and accesses Alice—who is Renee in disguise—through a more legible structure of desire) initially appears to resolve the problem of the unknowable desire of the Other. Alice's desire is transparent where Renee's was opaque. But when Peter removes the last obstacle (killing Andy) and the fantasy scenario would finally deliver complete sexual access, the object dissolves into nothingness: Alice tells Peter 'You'll never have me' and disappears. The consistent formal message of Lynch's cinema—enacted through the splitting of characters, the collapse of fantasy into the real, the dissolution of the sexual resolution—is that the object-cause of desire is nothingness itself, and that genuine enjoyment in the real requires surrendering the ideological fantasy of romantic completion rather than seeking its fulfillment.

Key concepts: Cinema of Intersection, Fantasy, Desire, Objet petit a, Real, Jouissance, Paternal Function, Splitting of the Subject Notable examples: Lynch, Lost Highway (1997); Lynch, Blue Velvet (1986); Lynch, Mulholland Drive (2001)

Main interlocutors

Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI (Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis)
Jacques Lacan, Seminar VII (The Ethics of Psychoanalysis)
Jacques Lacan, Seminar XVII (The Other Side of Psychoanalysis)
Jacques Lacan, Seminar XX (Encore)
Jacques Lacan, Les Formations de l'inconscient
Jacques Lacan, Écrits
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Sigmund Freud, Studies on Hysteria
Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies
Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative
Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject
Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier
Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema
Jean-Louis Baudry (apparatus theory)
Louis Althusser (ideological interpellation)
Joan Copjec (new Lacanian film theory)
Hegel, Science of Logic
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
Kant, Critique of Practical Reason
Sartre, Being and Nothingness
Agamben, State of Exception
Nietzsche, Human All Too Human
David Bordwell (cognitive film theory)
André Bazin (realist film theory)

Position in the corpus

The Real Gaze occupies a pivotal position in the Lacanian film-theory corpus: it is the most systematic book-length effort to move Lacanian film theory from its first wave (apparatus theory, Screen theory, Mulvey) through and beyond its second wave (Žižek, Copjec) toward a positive typological theory of cinema organized around the real-order gaze. It shares significant ground with Žižek's film essays collected in The Fright of Real Tears and Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock), and with Joan Copjec's Read My Desire, but goes further than either in building a systematic formal taxonomy rather than individual case studies or polemical interventions. It should be read after familiarizing oneself with Seminar XI (particularly the four fundamental concepts and the section on the gaze), Seminar VII (ethics of psychoanalysis), Žižek's The Sublime Object of Ideology (for the account of ideology, fantasy, and the objet petit a), and Metz's The Imaginary Signifier (the target of McGowan's critique). It pairs productively with Copjec's Read My Desire as a corrective to semiotics-based film theory, and with Alenka Zupančič's Ethics of the Real for the Kantian-Lacanian ethical framework that McGowan deploys in his Mann and Wenders chapters.\n\nFor readers coming from film studies rather than Lacanian theory, The Real Gaze provides an unusually accessible entry point into the concept of jouissance, objet petit a, and the real as they function in a concrete medium, with sustained readings of both canonical art cinema and mainstream Hollywood. It should ideally be followed by McGowan's companion volume The Impossible David Lynch for a more extended treatment of the cinema of intersection, and by Hilary Neroni's The Violent Woman for a feminist extension of the same theoretical framework. Readers coming from Lacanian clinical or philosophical contexts will find the book most valuable for its systematic application of the traversal of fantasy and the ethics of psychoanalysis to aesthetic and political questions—applications that the clinical literature rarely makes explicit.