ABSTRACT

Slavoj Zizek's work tends to focus on the register of the Real and Heath's on the symbolic, both understand the imaginary or, more generally, fantasy as—in Heath's words—an "order of an achieved unity of relations on the subject confirmed as a sufficient center". The specific thrust is that the fantasmatic might better be seen as allied with the aesthetic or the specific work of art. In terms of, in particular, the genre of film noir, touchstone for this hypothesis is the Satyr-like "happy end" of Woman in the Window which, is neither a bitter "last laugh" nor some lame castratory "joke". Zizek’s own particular, Gargantuan appetite for noir/Hitchcock aside, it's instructive that the very last question on popular culture in the "Self-Interview" is also the most telling. As for Alice, Woman in the Window's femme fatale, she is not—for the Zizek of The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime—the "elusive spectral presence"associated with classic noir, but a paranoiac, masochistic male fantasy.