Lynchean Worlds

In contrast to prevailing readings of Lynch’s films as obscurantist New Age allusions to a peaceful spiritual rapture underlying irrational forces, or as a convoluted post-modern pastiche of cliches, Zizek insists on taking Lynch seriously. This means, for Zizek, reading him through Lacan. Zizek’s Lacan is not the Lacan of post-structuralism, the theorist of the floating signifier, but the Lacan of the Real, the first category in the famous Lacanian triad of the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic. The most under-represented of the Lacanian categories, the Real is also the most unfathomable because it is fundamentally impenetrable and cannot be assimilated to the symbolic order of language and communication (the fabric of daily life); nor does it belong to the Imaginary, the domain of images with which we identify and which capture our attention. According to Lacan, fantasy is the ultimate support of our “sense of reality.“ The Real is the hidden ”traumatic underside of our existence or sense of reality, whose disturbing effects are felt in strange and unexpected places: the Lacanian Sublime. Lynch’s films attest to the fact that the fantasmatic support of reality functions as a defense against the Real, which often intrudes into the lives of the protagonists in the form of extreme situations, through violence or sexual excesses, in disturbing behavior that is both horrific and enjoyable, or in the uncanny effects of close-ups or details. The unfathomable, traumatic nature of the situations Lynch creates also makes them sublime.

- Marek Wieczorek, "The Ridiculous, Sublime Art of Slavoj Zizek"