Real Gaze

Todd McGowan is Associate Professor of English at the University of Vermont and the author of The End of Dissatisfaction? Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment and The Feminine "No!": Psychoanalysis and the New Canon, both also published by SUNY Press.

• PrefaceAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: From the Imaginary Look to the Real GazePart 1. The Cinema of Fantasy: Exposing the Excess                     1. Fantasy and Showing Too Much2. Theoretical Fantasizing 3. The Politics of Cinematic Fantasy4. Early Explorations of Fantasy5. The Coldness of Kubrick6. Spike Lee's Fantasmatic Explosions7. Michael Mann and the Ethics of Excess8. The Bankruptcy of Fantasy in FelliniPart 2. The Cinema of Desire: Absence amid the Plenitude of the Image                                                          9. Desire and Not Showing Enough10. Theoretical Desiring11. The Politics of Cinematic Desire12. The Impossible Object of the Nouvelle Vague13. The Banality of Orson Welles14. Claire Denis and the Other's Failure to Enjoy15. Political Desire in Italian NeorealismPart 3. The Cinema of Integration: The Marriage of Desire and Fantasy                                                               16. The Intermixing of Desire and Fantasy17. The Theoretical Opposition18. The Politics of the Cinema of Integration19. The Ordinary Cinema of Ron Howard 20. Steven Spielberg's Search for the Father 21. D. W. Griffith's Suspense 22. Films That SeparatePart 4. The Cinema of Intersection: Collisions of Desire and Fantasy                                                               23. The Separation of Desire and Fantasy24. Theorizing the Real25. The Politics of the Cinema of Intersection26. The Overlapping Worlds of Andrei Tarkovsky27. Alain Resnais between the Present and the Past28. Wim Wenders and the Ethics of Fantasizing29. The Sexual Relationship with David LynchNotesIndex

"By 'real gaze' McGowan means … Lacan's gaze is not the look of the spectator at the film but something the spectator encounters in the object seen, something that disturbs or distorts the experience of the object … McGowan is solid on his theory." — CHOICE"The style and arguments in this book are impressively clear and concise. Complex ideas are made straightforward through use of anecdote and illustration and the author unhesitatingly draws his examples from both 'art house' cinema and popular Hollywood movies." — Mikita Brottman, author of High Theory/Low Culture"This book is clearly written, persuasive, and contains an insightful exposition of difficult Lacanian concepts." — Henry Krips, author of Fetish: An Erotics of Culture