An Interview with Todd McGowan

In The Impossible David Lynch, Todd McGowan launches a provocative exploration of weirdness and fantasy in David Lynch’s groundbreaking oeuvre. He studies Lynch’s talent for blending the bizarre and the normal to emphasize the odd nature of normality itself.nnQ: There are many books dealing with Lynch and his cinema. Why do we need another?nnTodd McGowan: It is true that Lynch’s popularity as a filmmaker has led to many studies of him and his films. But his popularity has also tended to produce popular rather than theoretical analyses of his work that address the work as a whole and attempt to find an idea that runs throughout his films. The Impossible David Lynchattempts to provide a theoretical engagement with Lynch’s filmmaking that captures the unconscious source of his popularity.nnQ: In what sense is Lynch impossible? Why do you describe him with this term?nnTM: Clearly, if Lynch wasn’t possible in some sense, he simply wouldn’t exist. I use the term “impossible” in reference to Lynch because his films allow us to rethink our idea of what is truly impossible. Hollywood has always depicted heroes accomplishing the impossible, and Lynch belongs wholly to this tradition. But there is a difference between Lynch’s depiction of the impossible and what comes from Hollywood. Lynch sustains the impossible as impossible within his filmic world and nonetheless shows it occurring, while the traditional Hollywood film creates a filmic world in which the impossible becomes possible (where love can transcend all barriers, for instance). Lynch’s films are disturbing, I contend, precisely because they show us how the impossible is often an ideological rather than a material barrier.nnQ: Much of the fascination with Lynch’s films stems from the mystery that they produce. Isn’t there a danger of explaining too much and thereby theorizing away what makes Lynch a compelling filmmaker?nnTM: My goal in this book is not to understand everything in every one of Lynch’s films but to locate the role that the failure to understand plays in each case. No one can understand everything—especially in a Lynch film—but we can interpret the film with the idea of isolating the points in the film that resist sense. I believe that this type of interpretation has the effect of increasing the mysterious effect of Lynch’s films rather than eliminating it.nnQ: The book is centered around the notion of fantasy. How does Lynch employ fantasy differently than other filmmakers?nnTM: Cinema necessarily partakes of fantasy. If we go to the cinema, we do so because a film appeals to us to some extent on the level of fantasy. And yet, Lynch manipulates the filmic fantasy in an utterly original fashion. In The Impossible David Lynch, I contend that Lynch creates a world of fantasy as a separate space within his filmic worlds and that this allows him to reveal how fantasy shapes our existence. What’s more, the technique of isolating a separate fantasy space makes clear the ethical dimension of fantasy that no other filmmaker has explored.nnQ: Why is it necessary to turn to psychoanalysis in order to understand Lynch’s films? What does psychoanalysis provide that speaks directly to Lynch as a filmmaker?nnTM: Lynch’s films aim to appeal to the spectator’s unconscious, which is why they seem so strange in comparison with films by other filmmakers. Any approach to Lynch as a filmmaker that doesn’t begin with the idea of the unconscious and a sense of its distinctive logic cannot successfully engage his films. Psychoanalysis focuses on what doesn’t make sense, on our failures to understand, and this is precisely what Lynch’s films highlight in our experience as spectators.