McGowan, Todd 1967-

PERSONAL:

Born September 10, 1967.

ADDRESSES:

Office—400 Old Mill, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT 05405-4030. E-mail—Todd.McGowan@uvm.edu.

CAREER:

Educator and writer. University of Vermont, Burlington, associate professor and director of film and television studies.

WRITINGS:

The Feminine "No!": Psychoanalysis and the New Canon, State University of New York Press (Albany, NY), 2001.

The End of Dissatisfaction? Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment, State University of New York Press (Albany, NY), 2004.

Lacan and Contemporary Film, Other Press (New York, NY), 2004.

The Impossible David Lynch, Columbia University Press (New York, NY), 2007.

The Real Gaze: Film Theory after Lacan, State University of New York Press (Albany, NY), 2007.

SIDELIGHTS:

Todd McGowan is a university professor whose specialties include the twentieth-century American novel, film and television studies, psychoanalytic criticism, and critical theory. He is also the author of several books in these areas. In his 2007 book titled The Impossible David Lynch, the author examines the work of the noted film director and screenwriter whose movies include Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive. In an interview on the Columbia University Press Web site, the author explains why he wrote this specific book about the director, who has been written about extensively. McGowan noted that Lynch's "popularity has … tended to produce popular rather than theoretical analyses of his work that address the work as a whole and attempt to find an idea that runs throughout his films." McGowan added: The Impossible David Lynch attempts to provide a theoretical engagement with Lynch's film-making that captures the unconscious source of his popularity.

In his analysis of Lynch's work, the author focuses on the director's penchant for weirdness and fantasy in his films while blending the bizarre with the normal. The book is arranged so that each chapter focuses on one of Lynch's films and the idea of impossibility that it contains. The author also explores how the fantasies in Lynch's films represent a way through which the viewer is encouraged to find a new way of viewing the world. "My goal in this book is not to understand everything in every one of Lynch's films but to locate the role that the failure to understand plays in each case," McGowan noted in the Columbia University Press Web site interview.

In his book, the author also profiles Lynch, noting that he first pursued a career as a painter, which probably has contributed to the unusual visual aspects of his films. Stephen Reese, writing in the Library Journal, noted that the author "draws on the work of prominent psychoanalytic film theorists to examine Lynch's many worlds." Among these film critics whose work the author refers to are Christian Metz, Laura Mulvey, and Jean-Louis Baudry. However, the author also examines Lynch's work within the context of the works of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis; Jacques Lacan, a French psychoanalyst; and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German philosopher. In addition to Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive, the author discusses films such as the critically acclaimed The Elephant Man, the cult film Eraserhead, and the densely plotted Lost Highway.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Literature, June, 2001, review of The Feminine "No!": Psychoanalysis and the New Canon, p. 450; September, 2006, Rebecca Wanzo, "The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects," review of The End of Dissatisfaction? Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment, p. 650.

Choice, March, 2001, A. Thiber, review of The Feminine "No!", p. 1272; June, 2004, M. Uebel, review of The End of Dissatisfaction?, p. 1964.

Library Journal, March 1, 2007, Stephen Reese, review of The Impossible David Lynch, p. 86.

Reference & Research Book News, February, 2001, review of The Feminine "No!", p. 196; November, 2004, review of Lacan and Contemporary Film, p. 223.

ONLINE

Columbia University Press,http://www.columbia.edu/ (February 6, 2008), overview of The Impossible David Lynch; interview with author.

University of Vermont Department of English Web site,http://www.uvm.edu/~english/ (February 6, 2008), brief faculty profile of author.