Art of the Ridiculous Sublime - On David Lynch's Lost Highway - Slavoj Zizek.pdf

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THE ART OF THE
RIDICULOUS SUBLIME
On David Lynch’s Lost Highway
Slavoj Zizek
CONTENTS
Introduction:
he Ridiculous, Sublime Art of Slavoj Zizek
BY MAREK WIECZOREK / viii
THE ART OF THE RIDICULOUS SUBLIME:
On David Lynch’s Lost Highway
BY SLAVOJ Zizek I page 3
I he Inherent Transgression / page 4
2 he Feminine Act / page 8
3 Fantasy Decomposed / page 13
4 he hree Scenes / page 18
5 Canned Hatred / page 23
6 Fathers, Fathers Everywhere / page 28
7 he End of Psychology / page 32
8 Cyberspace Between Perversion and Trauma / page 36
9 he Future Antérieur in the History of Art / page 39
10 Constructing the Fundamental Fantasy / page 41
he Ridiculous, Sublime Art of Slavoj Zizek
Marek Wieczorek
Slavoj Zizek is one of the great minds of our time. Commentators have hailed
the Slovenian thinker as “the most formidably brilliant exponent of psycho-
analysis, indeed of cultural theory in general, to have emerged in Europe for
some decades.”1
The originality of Zizek’s contribution to Western intellectual history lies in
his extraordinary fusion of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, continental phi-
losophy (in particular his anti-essentialist readings of Hegel), and Marxist po-
litical theory. He lucidly illustrates this sublime thought with examples drawn
from literary and popular culture, including not only Shakespeare, Wagner,
or Kafka, but also ilm noir, soap operas, cartoons, and dirty jokes, which of-
ten border on the ridiculous. “I am convinced of my proper grasp of some
Lacanian concept, ”Zizek writes, “only when I can translate it successfully into
the inherent imbecility of popular culture.”2 The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime:
On David Lynch’s Lost Highway characteristically offers a lamboyant parade of
topics that reaches far beyond the scope of Lynch’s movie, delving into ilm
theory, ethics, politics, and cyberspace.
In contrast to prevailing readings of Lynch’s ilms 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 seri-
ously. This means, for Zizek, reading him through Lacan. Zizek’s Lacan is not
the Lacan of post-structuralism, the theorist of the loating signiier, but the
Lacan of the Real, the irst 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.
“3 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 ilms 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 horriic 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.
Illustrating his point about the Lynchean Real, Zizek has elsewhere invoked
the famous opening scene from Blue Velvet: the broad shots of idyllic small-
town Middle America with a father watering the lawn; suddenly, the father
suffers a stroke or heart-attack while the camera dramatically zooms in on the
grass with its bustling microscopic world of insects. “Lynch’s entire ‘ontology,”’
Zizek writes, “is based upon the discordance between reality, observed from a
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THE ART OF THE RIDICULOUS SUBLIME
safe distance, and the absolute proximity of the Real. His elementary proce-
dure involves moving forward from the establishing shot of reality to a disturb-
ing proximity that renders visible the disgusting substance of enjoyment, the
crawling and glistening of indestructible life.”4 Zizek notes how in Lynch’s
universe the Real eerily invades daily existence, with the camera’s point of view
often too close for comfort, with uncanny details sticking out, or close-ups of
insects or decomposing bodies. One is reminded here of Dali’s fascination
with insects, going back to a childhood memory of inding a dead bird with
ants crawling into it. Just as Dali relived this traumatic experience through
his paintings and in his ilm with Bunuel, Un chien andalou , Lynch has also
made paintings with similar subject matter, as well as sculpted heads, with real
ants invading rotting meats and bird cadavers afixed to the artwork.5 Lynch’s
technique characteristically consists of juxtaposing two incompatible, mutu-
ally exclusive realms which he nevertheless allows to invade one another: the
symbolic realm of representation (painting or sculpture) and the Real (the
decomposing meat and the ants teeming with life).
In The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989) , Zizek writes that “there is nothing in-
trinsically sublime in a sublime object-according to Lacan, a sublime object is
an ordinary, everyday object which, quite by chance, inds itself occupying the
place of what he calls das Ding [the Thing], the impossible-real object of desire.
. . . It is its structural place-the fact that it occupies the sacred/forbidden place
of jouissance and not its intrinsic qualities that confers on it its sublimity.”6
Lynch’s Lost Highway invokes the Lacanian Sublime in the most enigmatic
ways. In the essay published here, Zizek shows how the obstacle in the life of
the protagonist is precisely of the order of a fantasmatic projection onto an
impossible object of desire. About one-third into Lost Highway, the protago-
nist (Fred), who has been sentenced to death for the murder of his ostensibly
unfaithful wife (Renee), inexplicably transforms into another person (Pete) in
his prison cell. What follows is a bizarre shift from the dull, drab existence of
the impotent husband and his brunette wife, to the exciting and dangerous life
of the younger, virile Pete who is seduced by the sexually aggressive femme fa-
tale reincarnation of Renee, a blonde named Alice, played by the same actress
(Patricia Arquette). This shift, Zizek argues, represents Fred’s psychotic hallu-
cination, after the slaughter of his wife, of himself as a virile lover-a fantasmatic
scenario that ends up being more nightmarish than the irst part of the ilm.
Renee is a sublime object because Fred is ambiguously obsessed with her;
he suspects that her previous life involved some lewd or pornographic occu-
pation, that is to say, some secret, impenetrable place of jouissance (obscene
enjoyment), which is subsequently staged as a fantasmatic way out that never-
theless ends in failure.
According to Zizek, the circular narrative of Lost Highway renders visible
the circularity of the psychoanalytic process itself: there is a symptomatic key
phrase (as in all of Lynch’s ilms) that always returns as an insistent, traumatic,
and indecipherable message (the Real), and there is a temporal loop, as with
4
THE ART OF THE RIDICULOUS SUBLIME
analysis, where the protagonist at irst fails to encounter the self, but in the
end is able to pronounce the symptom consciously as his own. In Lost High-
way this is the phrase Fred hears at the very beginning of the ilm through
the intercom of his house, “Dick Laurant is dead,” referring to the evil and
obscene Mr. Eddy to whom Alice belongs. With the transition to the second
part of the ilm, the obstacle/failure thus changes from being inherent (Fred’s
impotence) to external (Mr. Eddy as the intervening “father-igure” of the Oe-
dipal triangle), which corresponds to the very deinition of fantasy, whereby
the inherent deadlock acquires positive existence. At the end of the ilm, Fred
kills Mr. Eddy and pronounces the (no longer enigmatic) phrase to himself
through the intercom.
Zizek’s reading is structured around a complex set of complementary op-
positions: that of reality and its fantasmatic support, and of the law and its
inherent transgression, which in Lynch’s universe are marked by the opposi-
tion of the ridiculous and the sublime. Mr. Eddy is one of those Lynchean
igures who embodies both poles: on the one hand, he strictly enforces the
rules, representing the enactment of the socio-symbolic Law, but on the other,
he does so in such an exaggerated, excessively violent manner that his role
exposes the inherently violent and arbitrary nature of the law. Mr. Eddy is one
of those sublime, hyperactive, life-enjoying agents against which the characters
in Lynch’s ilms attempt to protect themselves by resorting to a fantasy, equally
ridiculous, of something innocuously beautiful. “The gap that separates beauty
from ugliness,” Zizek writes, “is the very gap that separates reality from the
Real: what constitutes reality is the minimum of idealization the subject needs
in order to sustain the horror of the Real.”7 In Lynch’s universe, this minimum
of idealization is often pushed to the limits of believability, indeed to the level
of the ridiculous and thus exposed as fantasmatic, as in the pathetic scenes of
beatitude, with apparitions of angels (Fire Walk with Me and Wild at Heart) or
a dream about robins (Blue Velvet). Or it is contrasted with its sublime coun-
terpart, the larger-than-life, hyperactive igures embodying pure enjoyment
and excessive evil, such as Frank in Blue Velvet, Bobby Peru in Wild at Heart,
or Mr. Eddy, whom Zizek calls Pere jouissance (father of enjoyment). By using ex-
treme oppositions, Zizek argues, Lynch shows that evil is mediated, that there
is a speculative identity to good and evil, 8 that instead of being a substantial
force, evil is relexivized and composed of ludicrous clichés. He presents real-
ity and its fantasmatic support on the same surface, as a complementarity or
coincidence of opposites, as in itself necessarily multiple and inconsistent. It
is this enigmatic juxtaposition or coincidence of opposites in Lynch’s ilms-of
the protagonists’ comical ixation on an ordinary yet “sublime” object; of an
unbearably naive yet deadly serious vision; or the redemptive quality of clichés-
that makes them paradigmatically post-modern, corresponding to what Zizek
here qualiies as the enigma of “postmodernity”.
There is a radical decentering of human subjectivity characteristic of Freud-
ian/Lacanian theory that runs through Zizek’s essay on Lynch, ranging from
his analyses of a wide variety of ilms to his incisive commentary on contem-
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THE ART OF THE RIDICULOUS SUBLIME
porary politics. The uncanny specter of the automatic, mechanical produc-
tion of our innermost feelings provides the model for Lacan’s notion of the
“empty subject,” the barred subject (represented by the mathematical symbol
$) whose innermost fantasmatic kernel is transposed onto the “big Other,”
“the symbolic order which is the external place of the subject’s truth.”9 Since
our desire is always the desire of the Other-that is, both drawn from the Other
and directed to it-the disturbing thing is that we can never be certain what this
Other demands of us, what we are expected to be. Fred is perplexed by Renee/
Alice’s obscure desire, for example, and endlessly tries to interpret what she
wants. Zizek also demonstrates the idea of the big Other through reference
to Roberto Benigni’s ilm Life Is Beautiful. Here a father attempts to shield
his little son from the atrocities (the unbearable, unrepresentable Real) of a
Nazi concentration camp through the competitive evocation of the Other’s
desire, as though they were simply playing a game of survival, a metaphor for
the symbolic iction that renders reality bearable. Although this ilm remains
problematic, in part because it also treats its spectators as children, Zizek pre-
fers Benigni’s scenario to that of Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, which portrays
the experience of a Nazi camp commander who seems torn between his racist
prejudices and sexual attraction to a Jewish prisoner, as though it were simply
an expression of his immediate psychological self-experience. The problem
with this and other at-tempts to represent the Holocaust, according to Zizek, is
that it tries to explain the horrors of Nazism (or Stalinism) through the “psy-
chological proiles” of the individual perpetrators of atrocities.
Zizek’s rigorously ethical stance brings him to such extremes as to argue,
both in earlier writings and in this essay on Lynch, that Stalinism provides an
accurate model for understanding the institution of the symbolic order of our
daily lives. To speak of a Lacanian ethics of the Real is particularly appropriate
when we realize that Zizek’s understanding of Lacan was profoundly marked
by his irst-hand experience of the absurdities of bureaucratic communism in
the former Yugoslavia (as well as the more recent “ethnic cleansing” and other
atrocities committed in the Balkans in the name of nationalism). He explains
the crimes committed in Stalin’s or Hitler’s name not through the psychology
or perverse nature of the individuals involved, but through the logic of the big
Other. As Zizek shows in this essay, the question is not a matter of the psychic
economy of individuals versus the objective ideological system of the symbolic
order. Lacan has shown, precisely, how the subject is a function of the gap be-
tween the two, that, as Zizek writes here, “the difference between ‘subjective’
pathologies and the libidinal economy of the ‘objective’ ideological system is
ultimately something inherent to the subject.” Although nobody really believes
in the ruling ideology, we nevertheless strive to keep up its appearance, which
illuminates “the status of deception in ideology: those who should be deceived
by the ideological ‘illusion’ are not primarily concrete individuals but, rather,
the big Other; we should thus say that Stalinism has a value as the ontological
proof of the existence of the big Other.”’0 Zizek argues that the institution
exists only when people believe in it, or, rather, act as if they believe in it. The

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