McGowan, Todd. The Impossible David Lynch.

Wilson, D. Harlan

McGowan, Todd. The Impossible David Lynch. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. 265 pp. Paperback. ISBN 0-231-13955-1. $24.50.

David Lynch is a seminal, consistently divisive postmodern auteur. His films have been booed and castigated as much as they have been revered and embraced by cult fanatics. This divisiveness stems primarily from the fantastical (or what I would call irreal) nature of his work, which many viewers are quick to dismiss as "weird for weird's sake." Todd McGowan's The Impossible David Lynch overturns this notion, arguing that Lynch's cinema must be viewed differently than that of other filmmakers insofar as it "challenges the spectator's traditional experience of the cinema just as it engages and challenges the history of film theory" (2). Through the lens of Hegelian and Lacanian theory, McGowan makes a case for fantasy functioning as the "reality-support" of Lynch's diegeses and, by extension, the diegesis of viewers. These films, in other words, collapse the boundaries between spectator and screen; as such, they underscore how fantasy is not just a mindless escape from the real world, but a device for reconstructing and revolutionizing the social, psychological, and ideological fabric of the real world. In this light, The Impossible David Lynch is the finest critical work on the filmmaker to date, both in terms of its scope and theoretical impetus.

McGowan studies all of Lynch's feature films in chronological order. Short films are excluded, as is the recent Inland Empire (2006), which was released to a limited number of independent theaters and has yet to come out on DVD. Following an introduction that establishes his methodology, the book is divided into nine chapters, each devoted to a single film. In order of appearance, these films are Eraserhead (1977), The Elephant Man (1980), Dune (1984), Blue Velvet (1986), Wild at Heart (1990), Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992), Lost Highway (1997), The Straight Story (1999), and Mulholland Drive (2001). The Impossible David Lynch joins a surprisingly small group of book-length analyses on Lynch, among them Michel Chion's David Lynch (1995), Martha Nochimson's The Passion of David Lynch: Wild at Heart in Hollywood (1997) and Slavoj Zizek's The Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch's Lost Highway--the latter of which is merely an essay published in book form. While Nochimson's theoretical framework is his starting point, McGowan's methodology is most akin to Zizek's in that he uses Lacanian tenets to "look awry" at Lynch. Unlike Zizek, however, McGowan looks awry with far more clarity and direction. He adopts Zizek's basic angle of incidence (i.e., interpreting Lacan by way of popular cinema and vice versa) and develops it into a focused, dynamic, cohesive reading of the Lynchian oeuvre.

The "Impossible" of McGowan's title calls attention to the Real, one of three components in Lacan's psychic cosmology; the other components are the Symbolic (the realm of language) and the Imaginary (the realm of images as formed by the Symbolic). Not to be confused with reality, the Real is an illusory, unobtainable kernel of being around which reality and the human condition are structured within the symbolic order. The Real constitutes what cannot be spoken or imagined, yet it lurks beneath the surface of perceptual and actual experience and structures experience. According to McGowan, "a link exists between impossibility and what [Lacan] calls the real. Within every symbolic order, the real occupies the place of what cannot be thought or imagined--the position of the impossible. The real is not reality but the failure of the symbolic order to explain everything" (25). This failure or breakdown is what constitutes us as desiring subjects. Similarly, it constitutes filmic characters--although, according to McGowan, not in Lynch's films.

McGowan contends that Lynch does not represent reality from the position of the symbolic order. He represents it from the imagined position of the Real, which results in an inevitably skewed depiction of people, events, and atmospheres. "What is impossible in the symbolic order is, in the real, perfectly achievable. It is in this sense of the term impossible that Lynch's films allow us to experience it actually taking place" (25). Ironically, it is Lynch's penetration of the Real that makes him a thoroughgoing realist, or what Nochimson considers an "anti-fantasmatic filmmaker [...] opposed to standard Hollywood practice" (11). At the same time, this irony only works through the medium of fantasy, assuming that we understand fantasy as a distinctly real phenomenon and instigator of desire. Thus, reality and fantasy are intimately connected and, by exploring the vicissitudes of fantasy (which emerges as more real than reality), Lynch assesses and critiques the nature of reality. To varying degrees, McGowan employs this thesis in every chapter.

Lacanian psychoanalysis further informs (and is informed by) McGowan's study in its exploration of the pleasure we take in our desire for fantasy and the dangers of Realizing that pleasure. In Lynch's films, these dangers are almost invariably grotesque in both affected and affective ways. The third chapter on Dune, for instance, locates the Realization of pleasure in the figure of Baron Harkonnen, who is the hideous result of an "access to the inaccessible" (81). Profligate, obese, misshapen, diseased, and psychotic, the Baron revels in the exhibition of excessiveness and "is a source of pure enjoyment" (79). He instigates fear and loathing in other characters as well as spectators of Dune--a fear and loathing that can be extremely satisfying, if not euphoric. McGowan writes:

 The figure of Harkonnen [...] [is] part of the price we pay as
 spectators for the fantasy that Dune proffers. This is not to say
 that spectators can't enjoy Harkonnen. They can and do. But our
 enjoyment of him renders the obscenity of our own enjoyment visible
 to ourselves. The depiction of the Harkonnen world forces us to see
 the aspect of our fantasy that we would like to disavow, and yet it
 is integral to the way that fantasy delivers on its promises. This
 is what the proliferation of fantasy looks like. (82)

This passage is indicative of McGowan's skillful ability to implicate spectators in the spectacle of cinema. Not only does Lynch put his characters at odds with one another, he does the same to his audience, demonstrating how our darkest nightmares are in fact symptoms of our greatest desires. It is in this way that Lynch captures the title of McGowan's introduction: "The Bizarre Nature of Normality" (1).

Lynch is notorious for his recurrent use of certain images and themes. His trademark theme is the doppelganger, a figure that materializes in every one of his films, sometimes flagrantly (e.g., loving father and filicidal maniac Leeland Palmer/Bob in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me), sometimes less pronounced (e.g., the suburban utopia and urban underground of Blue Velvet), but always in a formative and pathologized manner. McGowan suggests that the fundamental opposition of the doppelganger "structures all of Lynch's films, and in each case Lynch sustains the opposition throughout the film, contributing to the bizarre quality of his work" (12). The doppelganger manifests in the fantasy/reality binary (with fantasy as the dominant half) on which Lynch focuses. We also see it manifest in masculine/feminine and screen/spectator binaries. By the end of The Impossible David Lynch, McGowan effectively deconstructs that binary, showing how the two halves bleed and collapse into one another.

Moreover, in a conclusion called "The Ethics of Fantasy," he demonstrates how Lynch is basically Kantian. His sense of fantasy harbors an ethical component, an idea that, for most philosophers, "seems absurd on the surface because fantasy represents a turn away from others rather than an attempt to engage them" (220). In short, McGowan turns to Kant to illustrate how Lynch's application of fantasy is agential, encouraging viewers to alter their perception of consciousness and the world. My one critique of the book is that I would have liked to see this section further developed; at under four pages, it doesn't appear to do justice to the issues it raises. Additionally, McGowan doesn't invoke Kant until the end (except in a few notes), an abrupt shift from the psychoanalytic approach that dominates his book. Nonetheless his point is clear: "Kant clarifies the direct link between fantasy and ethics that guides Lynch's filmmaking" (220). And the conclusion does provide fertile ground for future scholarship on Lynch.

The Impossible David Lynch is an astute, provocative combination of close readings and larger theoretical explorations. In addition, each chapter begins with brief contextual remarks on the production and reception of the film in question. Although not for the casual reader, McGowan has written a crucial text for any serious Lynch scholar.