Double Fantasy: Total Recall and The Woman in the Window (Zizek/Lacan 4)

The following is part of a series in which I apply rudimentary concepts from Lacanian psychoanalysis to current events and film. My two principal texts are Lacan, an introductory text by Lionel Bailly, and Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture by philosopher Slavoj Zizek. I present these posts in order to deepen my imperfect understanding of the concepts as well as to venture some insights of my own.

Fantasy space is among the many interesting concepts in Slavoj Zizek’s Looking Awry. The book explores the concept through examples from film and literature. Here, I will take a look at the concept through Zizek’s own example of legendary director Fritz Lang’s The Woman in the Window (1944) as well as the recent remake of Total Recall (2012).

According to Zizek, “fantasy space functions as an empty surface, as a kind of screen for the projection of desires.” In works of fiction, fantasy space takes the form of a world within, underneath or in the cracks of everyday reality: dreams, idle fantasies, virtual reality, alternate dimensions. The characters’ adventures within these fantasy spaces enact their desires. One of Zizek’s examples, Robert Scheckley’s short story “Store of the Worlds,” reminded me of Total Recall.

In Total Recal, a factory worker named Douglas Quaid visits a company named Rekall to receive artificial memories fulfilling any fantasy he desires. He chooses to have memories of being a double-agent in the conflict between the government and the resistance. However, as he sits in the injection chair, government agents bust in and try to arrest him for being exactly that: a double agent. As the movie plays out, Quaid learns he was a spy, but the authorities caught him, wiped his memory, and gave him a new life as a common laborer. Quaid fights back and in the end topples the evil regime.

It is possible read Total Recall as mostly occurring within a fantasy space. In this reading, everything from the injection chair onward is a fantasy provided by Rekall. At some point after the film ends, Quaid would wake up and return to his life as a factory worker, albeit with some mind-blowing memories, and the oppressive rule of the government over everyday, hardworking folk would remain in place.

Total Recall presents a clear example of fantasy space as a formal mechanism in fiction, but I eventually realized, for reasons I will explain, it isn’t the best example for illustrating Lacanian psychoanalysis and its efficacy. Zizek’s own example, The Woman in the Window (1944), is a more penetrating work, as well as an enjoyable film noir without the aid of fancy concepts.

The film is about Richard Wanley, an aging psychologist with a handsome wife, two children, and--like Quaid in Total Recall--a desire for excitement. One night as he leaves his club, he notices a portrait of an alluring woman hanging in a storefront window. At that moment, the actual woman who modeled for the portrait approaches him and they end up having drinks back at her place. When her lover storms in and attacks, Richard fatally stabs him with a pair of scissors. The ensuing difficulties in Richard’s life eventually lead to his suicide . . . but then he wakes up back at the club, having fallen asleep in his chair and dreamt the whole scenario.

According to Zizek, this is no clumsy way of providing a happy ending:

“The message of the film is not consoling, not: ‘it was only a dream, in reality I am a normal man like others and not a murderer!’ but rather: in our unconscious, in the real of our desire, we are all murders. . . . we could say that the professor awakes in order to continue his dream (about being a normal person like his fellow men), that is, to escape the real (the ‘psychic reality’) of his desire.”

In other words, we each have two sides: one we present to the world and one we keep hidden even from ourselves. The first is an illusory construction of the ego, while the second is the seedy truth of our unconscious. Dreams pull back the veil of the former to reveal what lies beneath.

This is what sets The Woman in the Window apart from Total Recall. In Total Recall, Quaid simply gets the fantasy he wants: he gets excitement, he gets dangerous lovers, he gets to save the world. His fantasy space delivers to his ego exactly what it would devise to flatter itself. In The Woman in the Window, however, the psychologist’s fantasy reveals a repressed and unsettling inner reality: one in which he is a cheater, a debaucher and a murderer.

For that reason, Richard’s fantasy is more powerful, and therefore transformative. In Total Recall, it is hard to imagine that Quaid, upon waking, would be relieved to find himself back in his apartment facing another day at the factory. Richard, however, is overjoyed to find himself back in his daily life. Upon leaving the club, he stops to look at the portrait of the woman once again, and again he meets a woman. But this time, he rebuffs her advance and runs away.  We know he will now relish his humdrum existence like never before.

We have then, two types of fantasy. One is a mere fiction, while the other is an eruption of a deep inner reality. Pleasurable fantasies can also exercise hidden corners of ourselves, but it is the dangerous fantasy that holds the greatest potential for meaningful personal change.

Previous posts in this series:

Identifying with Ferguson as Symptom
Watching Cinema Through the Eyes of the Past
Don’t LookAway from Mike Brown

Also related:

Total Recall, the Cultural Superego, and a Nation in Denial