I don't read the movie, or at least I didn't read the movie on this viewing and the second part of it as being, you know, I think it's much too easy and too simplistic and too reductive to think of the distinction between fantasy and desire between the first part of the movie and the second as being a distinction between, you know, fantasy dream world and reality, between a daytime that's bright and clear

and warm and happy and a nighttime that's dark and miserable and scary. Because the second part of

the film feels like it's penetrated, it's written through by fantasy as well, you know, and this

kind of revenge fantasy seems emblematic of that. But I think boring somewhat from McGowan here that the

thesis of this movie, if it has one, is not that, you know, you have fantasy, which is an illusion

and is bad, and you have a reality, which is true, even if it is bad and scary. It's that the two

are actually deeply enmeshed with one another. They are, in a sense, a symbiotic.

McGowan characterizes the film as exploring the role that fantasy has in rendering our experience

coherent and meaningful. And he says this, as we contrast the first part of the film with the

second, it quickly becomes evident that the first seems more real, more in keeping with our

expectations concerning reality. That's because, as we've said, it has a more conventional

chronological structure. But this sense of reality results from the film's phantasmatic

dimension rather than its realism. Where we usually contrast fantasy with reality,

Mahal and Drive underlines the link between the two, depicting fantasy's role

in providing reality with the structure that it has. The film supports Lacan's claim that everything

we are allowed to approach by way of reality remains rooted in fantasy. As a category, fantasy

should not be opposed to reality because it is fantasy that sustains what we experience as reality.

And he goes on to talk about how Lost Highway explores the same idea,

but this film is kind of a radicalized expression of that idea and takes it in many ways further.

I think it's very true that fantasy and reality are in a sense mutually complementary

and symbiotic.

And I think, you know, the film expresses that in that, you know, the Diane Selwyn portion,

...