Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

amounts to a Brechtian revolution in the making of films. 21 To produce a cinema no
longer ‘obsessively subordinated to the neurotic needs of the male ego’ (18), it is necessary
to break with illusionism, making the camera material, and producing in the
audience ‘dialectics, passionate detachment’ (ibid.). Moreover, ‘[w]omen, whose image
has continually been stolen and used for this end [objects of the male gaze], cannot
view the decline of the traditional film form with anything much more than sentimental
regret’ (ibid.). (For feminist criticisms of Mulvey’s argument, see Chapter 7).
Slavoj 2i4ek and Lacanian fantasy
Slavoj biaek and Lacanian fantasy 107
Terry Eagleton describes the Slovenian critic Slavoj yizek ‘as the most formidably brilliant
exponent of psychoanalysis, indeed of cultural theory in general, to have emerged
in Europe for some decades (quoted in Myers, 2003: 1). Ian Parker (2004), on the
other hand, claims that ‘[t]here is no theoretical system as such in yizek’s work, but it
often seems as if there is one. . . . He does not actually add any specific concepts to
those of other theorists but articulates and blends the concepts of others’ (115, 157).
The three main influences on yizek’s work are the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich Hegel, the politics of Marx and the psychoanalysis of Lacan. It is, however,
the influence of Lacan that organizes the place of Marx and Hegel in his work. Whether
we agree with Eagleton or Parker, what is true is that yizek is an interesting reader of
texts (see, for example, yizek, 1991, 2009). In this short account, I will focus almost
exclusively on his elaboration of the Lacanian notion of fantasy.
Fantasy is not the same as illusion; rather, fantasy organizes how we see and understand
reality. It works as a frame through which we see and make sense of the world.
Our fantasies are what make us unique; they provide us with our point of view; organizing
how we see and experience the world around us. When the pop musician Jarvis
Cocker (former lead singer with Pulp) appeared on BBC Radio 4’s long-running programme,
Desert Island Discs (24 April 2005), he made this comment: ‘It doesn’t really
matter where things happen, it’s kinda what’s going on in your head that makes life
interesting.’ This is an excellent example of the organizing role of fantasy.
yizek (1989) argues that ‘ “Reality” is a fantasy construction which enables us to
mask the Real of our desire’ (45). Freud (1976) gives an account of a man who dreams
that his dead son came to him to complain, ‘Can’t you see that I am burning?’ The
father, Freud argues, is awoken by the overwhelming smell of burning. In other words,
the outside stimulation (burning), which had been incorporated into the dream, had
become too strong to be accommodated by the dream. According to yizek (1989),
The Lacanian reading is directly opposed to this. The subject does not awake himself
when the external irritation becomes too strong; the logic of his awakening is
quite different. First he constructs a dream, a story which enables him to prolong his
sleep, to avoid awakening into reality. But the thing that he encounters in the dream,