Blog Response VII: Slavoj Žižek's "The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch's 'Lost Highway'"

Slavoj Žižek is almost without doubt the most well-known living philosopher. He made his debut in the English-speaking world with his 1989 book The Sublime Object of Ideology, in which he gave an account of political ideology through an innovative interpretation of the notion of a fetish in both Marx and Freud - arguing that both notions essentially come to the same thing.

In the 25 years since this book, Žižek has become an incredibly prolific writer and speaker. He has become especially known for being an eccentrically engaging speaker. He speaks with heavy Slovenian accent, a noticeable lisp, and frenetic gestures, explaining recondite philosophical material through a dizzying array of pop culture examples and politically incorrect jokes.

Among the works that launched his early career were a series of brilliant philosophically informed books and essays on film, including, most prominently, highly influential works on film noir and the films of Alfred Hitchcock.

In our companion essay for Lost Highway - The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch's Lost Highway - Žižek deploys psychoanalytic notions to interpret the film's relationship to film noir, and to draw connections between his reading of the film and contemporary cultural phenomena.

For a preview of the themes of the essay (and a taste of Žižek's singular speaking presence), please watch the following 5-minute excerpt from a feature-length film on Žižek's interpretations of film - The Pervert's Guide to Cinema - about Lost Highway:

Blog Response VI: David Lynch's "Lost Highway"

Please read the entry below, and answer the questions posed to you in the comments. Then, read Slavoj Žižek's essay The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch's Lost Highway, which you can find here. Note: you don't need to read the editor's introduction; Žižek's essay itself is found on pp.9-48 of the PDF. I will post an entry on Žižek's essay with questions for you within the next day.

David Lynch achieved the height of his mainstream success with the 1990-91 T.V. series Twin Peaks. Twin Peaks - a dark, surreal soap opera revolving initially around the mystery of the brutal rape and murder of a small-town homecoming queen, Laura Palmer - was explosively popular. At its inception, it was a poorly advertised mid-season replacement. However, it rapidly moved to the center of the media spotlight, in large part due to the storm of speculation about its central mystery on online message boards. Its serialized narrative prefigured the renaissance, in the last ten years, of serialized dramatic television in the U.S. And, it was one of the first examples of a pop culture phenomenon that gained currency, not through traditional media channels, but over the internet, which was still in its infancy.

However, the popular decline of the series was as rapid as its ascent. By the middle of the second season, ratings had declined precipitously. And finally, the dramatic financial and critical failure of Lynch's cinematic prequel to the series - Fire Walk With Me - transformed him overnight into an entertainment industry pariah. 

Fortunately for Lynch, he still had a three film contract with the French production company Studio Canal. Initially, because of the failure of Fire Walk With Me, Studio Canal dragged their feet on funding another Lynch film. However, in 1995 they finally funded the filming of Lost Highway.