You Will Never Have Me: Projections on the Screen of Impossible Desire

*originally published in AUTRE’s 2025 Desire issue
by Abbey Meaker

Desire waits in the house
wounded and restrained
it best serves in these liminal spaces
folded and tucked away
bare legs guarding the sea
where a whole world beckons


Cinema is the ultimate pervert art. It doesn't give you what you desire. It tells you how to desire. 
-  Slavoj Žižek

Desire is the animating force. The vitality of desire has little to do with the object of desire but rather what it communicates. Desire springs from melancholy, a profoundly transporting state of being: it is a paradox containing existential emptiness, spiritual moors, curiosity, the loneliness of creative genius, and the passion and longing of a solitary bird. Melancholy digs for meaning, hands deep in the murky swamp of memory. From this swamp comes desire. A central concept of Buddhism and Hinduism is that desire creates suffering, but the opposite could be true: desire creates meaning and fills our lack with a sense of wonder. Desire is a finger pointing toward truth. We come to know ourselves and the divine through desiring (and that which we desire). Desire is a wish insistent in its demands. It continually reframes one's reality: it curls back, a silk red ribbon, a tongue, leading us, luring us back to unknown places once familiar. It is an imprint, a residue, forever haunting the house. It is uncanny, a window into a home that looks like home but isn't. This appetite, like a fire, like all living organisms, consumes, reproduces, responds to stimuli, and gives off waste (what we abandon)—a light flickering in the cave, a theater.
 



One must enter at their own risk. When the curtain is raised, we will be delivered from our blissful state into the world of ideas. Here, a thought, a word, a glance can conjure a potential new life. In gazing upon the stage, the screen, the dream, we swing back into ourselves. Desire is an invitation, a searchlight. Who will be standing guard at the gate? Cinema is the vehicle (through which we explore these unfolding frontiers) of desire, where we can contemplate these worlds from a safe distance. Through the doorway of our blissful state, into a room of mirrors.

Films are apparitions of desire, ghostly projections on a screen, a flickering invitation to transgress boundaries and sink into the abyss of fantasy. Here, we see how flimsy our constructed realities are and how fragile the illusion is. The whisper of desire calls us to dark corners and pulls the strings of our curiosity to know what is on the other side of the curtain, the closed door—the medium between two worlds. Often, a film reveals our desires to us, but we remain on the edge of observing, rarely entering. We are spectators. The films of David Lynch demand participation in that they confront the limits of what we imagine as real. His films create the feeling that another world is encroaching on this one. Lynch's sentient, cinematic realms are thinly veiled by curtains, bright red or blue velvet. They conceal an entrance—a door, an ear, a radiator, a blue box. On the other side, a shadow world breathes—dionysian and teeming with possibility. Beyond the doorway is a boundaryless infinity. 






To inhabit the place beyond the curtain, one must forfeit the comfort of a single logic, a familiar destination, a conclusion. Paradoxical like our fertile melancholy, the desired object remains a shapeshifting phantasm, and we are continually in pursuit of meaning. In Blue Velvet (1986), young Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) is dragged by his curiosity through the discovery of a severed ear, into an inky dark world; or what Lynch called a dream of strange desires…it's what could happen if you ran out of fantasy. The unknowable interiors of this place compel him; he can only catch glimpses, which keeps him searching, having only a dim light. Obsessed by the mysterious and tormented lounge singer Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini), Jeffrey breaks into her apartment and hides in her closet. Through small slats in the door, he watches Dorothy unmask: she removes her wig and undresses; she nervously paces around the room. Jeffrey stands at yet a new threshold; he is straddling two worlds: Jeffrey can secretly, safely observe with clean hands or venture out of the closet, where Dorothy begs him to hit her, to feel her. Dark red lips invite him inside. "Do you like the way I feel?" Jeffrey initially recoils at Dorothy's request to hit her but eventually submits. His heroic impulses are impotent: Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) arrives and attacks Dorothy. He is a deranged gas-huffing man-baby begging to consume the mother's body. "Mommy, mommy, baby wants to fuck!" Frank floats between the abusive father and the oedipal son. On the outside, Blue Velvet is a good vs. evil; light cannot exist without darkness mystery. Inside, one finds a more subversive offering: Lynch guides us to the darkened outskirts of ourselves, where repressed urges batter the shoreline, and then he turns on the light. 




Every David Lynch film explores the possibility of a feeling—off-shoots of moments that become strands of being that mingle and create a tether to a new universe, a new dream. Lynch talked about ideas as if they were unseen entities, always there, waiting to be sensed and pulled out of their darkness, akin to Sandy appearing out of a thick material night. Another place from which a body could emerge. Our attention animates and imbues the image, subject, and object with life. Now, it is out there on its own, existing and desiring. In Lost Highway (1997), Fred Madison (Bill Pullman) is so consumed by paranoia and jealousy that he believes a whole world into being, a world in which his wife Renee (Patricia Arquette) has clandestine relationships with other men. Perhaps in his impotence, he imagines he is an other, able to fuck his wife into the floor, but the fantasy is so potent that he forgets this man is a stand-in, a creation of his imagination. To possess the desired object, Fred kills Renee. What happens when one runs out of fantasy? A spatiotemporal disruption thrusts us into a double world, where Fred becomes Pete (Balthazar Getty) and Renee becomes Alice, this time a blonde femme fatale. In the beach scene, Alice and Pete are naked, illuminated by car lights, their bodies overexposed. They have become two writhing light forms, spectral. The material becomes ethereal, exposing the slipperiness of this realm. The moment one grasps for an absolute, to possess the projected image, to know it, the charge of the impossible desire vanishes like a mirage in a barren purgatory. 




Desire is often encountered in a surprise visit or probing. Contemplating its urges is a spiritual pursuit. A desire—if we can allow the heightened emergency of its moment to simmer, can bridge the carnal and the divine. Acting on a transgressive desire can breach all kinds of boundaries and cause a collapse of ideas, identity, and love. The power of wishes is so potent that we do not always consider the repercussions of abandoning an order. Is this sacrifice part of what impels us? Lynch explores these drives through the double: characters who, through a dream or the construction of another self, submit to vertigo; the irrepressible temptation to fall, to do the forbidden thing. Frank Booth was an image in Jeffrey Beaumont's mirror. Pete is Fred's young stallion. 

Oneiric and libidinal, Mulholland Drive (2001) explores these hidden passages more subtly. There are flickers of a dream world, a feeling that reality is fluid. After the first act, the story splits, and Diane (Naomi Watts) appears—not dead but waking from sleep—a dream sequence signaled by a green blanket and red pillow. Betty, Rita (Laura Harring), and Club Silencio were a dream projected on the back of her eyelids. What makes Lynch's films so transporting is that there is never a sense of an orderly real place from which the characters travel to other dreamlike realms. Every filmic environment feels unsteady with its own set of logic. This malleability liberates the characters to explore their shadowed, innermost realms and, by extension, their voyeurs: us. These are stories about the depth and complexity of one's interiority, the possibilities in and sacrifices of longing, the transcendence of self through loss, and the force of unrequited love: mad and burning like the fire which consumes, reproduces, and disposes of waste (the ruins).  Ultimately, the thrill of desiring vanishes, and we find ourselves again at the threshold of wanting. It is the wanting that is transformative, not the acquisition.




These uncanny desires seem so real, things to possess, but desire is a vibrant spectral thing. It possesses us. We seek the ghost, and it arrives, knocking on the door repeatedly. As soon as we invite it in, it vanishes; the flame is extinguished, and we are left alone with a yearning. To have is to lose; to behold is to long; to long is to live—to touch the infinity of the cosmos. In some ways, desire itself is sentient. It pulls from our emptiness and passion and projects visitors or guests; the more profound our belief in their materiality, the more real they seem to be, the more haunting. Contemplate with the imagined for too long, and one can become an apparition, isolated on an island of memories and dreams. All that is or seems real becomes a phantom. However, if we remain too warm in our blissful, blinded state, we are dead. Desire is the animating force. One can find the divine by keeping one foot in the door of material and the other in the world of ideas, straddling the space of what moves us and the world to which we are bound here on Earth. The mundane is exalted by the dimension of echoes, apparitions, and souls bound by invisible threads. Held in each other's harbor, forever casting gazes out to the horizon line of becoming. Here, wading in the river of wanting, our humanness meets the divine.

With endless gratitude to David Lynch (1946—2025)