Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

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Chapter 5 Psychoanalysis
the reality of his desire, the Lacanian Real – in our case, the reality of the child’s
reproach to his father, ‘Can’t you see that I am burning?’, implying the father’s fundamental
guilt – is more terrifying than so-called external reality itself, and that is
why he awakens: to escape the Real of his desire, which announces itself in the
terrifying dream. He escapes into so-called reality to be able to continue to sleep,
to maintain his blindness, to elude awakening into the real of his desire (45).
It is the father’s guilt about not having done enough to prevent his son’s death that is
the Real that the dream seeks to conceal. In other words, the reality to which he awakes
is less Real than that which he encountered in his dream.
yizek (2009) provides other examples from popular culture of the fantasy construction
of reality. Rather than fulfilling desire, fantasy is the staging of desire. As he explains,
[W]hat the fantasy stages is not a scene in which our desire is fulfilled, fully
satisfied, but on the contrary, a scene that realises, stages, the desire as such. The
fundamental point of psychoanalysis is that desire is not something given in
advance, but something that has to be constructed – and it is precisely the role of
fantasy to give the coordinates of the subject’s desire, to specify its object, to locate
the position the subject assumes in it. It is only through fantasy that the subject is
constituted as desiring: through fantasy, we learn how to desire (335).
In this way, then, ‘fantasy space functions as an empty surface, a kind of screen for the
projection of desires’ (336). He gives as an example a short story by Patricia Highsmith,
‘Black House’. In a small American town old men gather in a bar each evening to
remember the past. In different ways their memories always seem to become focused
on an old black house on a hill just outside town. It is in this house that each man can
recall certain adventures, especially sexual, having taken place. There is now, however,
a general agreement amongst the men that it would be dangerous to go back to the
house. A young newcomer to the town informs the men that he is not afraid to visit
the old house. When he does explore the house, he finds only ruin and decay.
Returning to the bar, he informs the men that the black house is no different from any
other old, decaying property. The men are outraged by this news. As he leaves, one of
the men attacks him, resulting in the young newcomer’s death. Why were the men so
outraged by the young newcomer’s behaviour? yizek explains it thus:
[T]he ‘black house’ was forbidden to the men because it functioned as an empty
space wherein they could project their nostalgic desires, their distorted memories;
by publicly stating that the ‘black house’ was nothing but an old ruin, the young
intruder reduced their fantasy space to everyday, common reality. He annulled the
difference between reality and fantasy space, depriving the men of the place in
which they were able to articulate their desires (337).
Desire is never fulfilled or fully satisfied, it is endlessly reproduced in our fantasies.
‘Anxiety is brought on by the disappearance of desire’ (336). In other words, anxiety is