Watched and Read - August 17, 2025

 

Watched and read this past week:

Movies

Karate Kid: Legends. Enjoyable and fun. I just wished they let the story breathe a little bit.

The Life of Chuck. Nice adaptation of King’s novella. I like that Mike Flanagan continues to adapt King’s work for the screen. Both Doctor Sleep and Gerald’s Game are great interpretations of his books. Still can’t believe he pulled off Gerald’s Game!

Watched four by Jim Jarmusch. Stranger Than Paradise, Down By Law, Mystery Train, and Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai. All excellent films. Love RZA’s score for Ghost Dog. Mystery Train might be my favorite of Jarmusch’s. It was sad seeing Joe Strummer. Wish he was still with us.

Everything’s Going to Be Great: Nice coming of age story. Great performance by Allison Janey.

Psycho Beach Party: Fun, but I felt it was a little too long. Cool to see Amy Adams in one of her earlier films.

The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad. Still holds up and still hilarious!

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TV

Halfway through the sixth season of Little House on the Prairie. Big improvement from the fifth season. But the two-part episode, “May We Make Them Proud,” was devastating and perhaps too much. I think Mary has been through enough.

Finishing up the latest season of Bob’s Burgers. Need more Teddy episodes!

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Books

Todd’s McGowan’s Introduction to Jacques Lacan. Outstanding. See my post.

Jack Finney’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Excellent read. One of my favorite sci-fi films (1956 version). The 1956 version left out the section where they discuss space spores, which was one of my favorite parts of the novel.

Review - Todd McGowan's Introduction to Lacan

Todd McGowan's new book is an excellent read and important book for those who are interested in Lacan. Over the years, I have read a lot of Lacan, along with Zizek, McGowan, Copjec, etc, and this by far is one of the best introductory books with lots of great examples. 

 

I love McGowan’s interpretation of Kant and Hegel in contextualizing Lacan’s three stages. The connection between Kant’s sensibility, understanding, and reason nicely line up with Lacan’s imaginary, symbolic and the Real in the first stage of Lacan’s work. But Lacan’s middle period turns to Hegel’s dialectic with his introduction of objet a (object cause of desire). McGowan claims that objet a, which is linked to the Real, is the fundamental object and perhaps one of Lacan’s greatest contributions. 

 

 

An example is Lacan’s concept of the gaze (which should not be confused with the look). The gaze (as the visual drive) demonstrates how our unconscious desire distorts the visual plane, something we don’t recognize in the everyday, but something movies can make apparent. McGowan offers Spielberg’s Duel as a great example. Lacan's examples are paintings, such as Las Meninas (see image below). The painter is painting a couple who we think are in the mirror image, located in the far background. For Lacan, the canvas is too big to be the mirror image. The canvas embodies the gaze because it does not fit within the representational world of the painting. As McGowan explains, the canvas demonstrates a resistance toward representation. 

  

Another example is The Ambassadors (see my blog post). When we encounter the gaze, we realize how our desire distorts the visual plane. The gaze is objet a within the field of vision. Encountering the gaze exemplifies that our spectatorship is not from a transcendent standpoint but within the painting or movie itself. That's where we locate the dialectic component of Lacan's work on desire.

I agree with McGowan that Lacan is the philosopher of the subject. The subject is always a split subject, a subject that is never at home with itself because of the unconscious. Lastly, it was great to read how many of Lacan’s concepts changed throughout his three periods, particularly the Real and jouissance. Highly recommend!