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- {"content": "Lynch scholarship is still very much dominated by Slavoj \u017di\u017eek, and under this Lacanian rubric his films are held to be all about dreams, the play between fantasy and reality; the point, as \u017di\u017eek puts it, is \u2018to discern in [the film] the part of (symbolic) reality and the part of fantasy hallucination.\u2019 Less scholarly critics are also fond of this line \u2013 describe a film as \u2018dreamlike,\u2019 and you\u2019re suddenly under no obligation to make any sense of it whatsoever. This is nonsense. A film is fantasy throughout, there\u2019s no point in trying to identify which part of it contains the \u2018real\u2019 narrative and which does not; it\u2019s as stupid as trying to work out whether Tony Soprano dies at the end, as if he were ever alive. Lynch\u2019s films aren\u2019t about dreams, they\u2019re about _media_, infinite layers of image and representation. The camera in the Mystery Man\u2019s hand, the tape mailed to your house, the video you watch from your seat until you find yourself, suddenly, within it. Reducing the Lynchian vertigo to oneirocriticism is actually deeply _boring_. Dreams are just a rearrangement of reality, but if you fold the process of representation you get _mise en abyme_, the image emerging from the void.", "id": "8418e91b-c340-440c-91c9-78385fd2c2b8", "author": "Sam Kriss"}
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