Traversing the Fantasy proposes a new and comprehensive model of spectatorship at the heart of which it draws an analogy between the ethics of Lacanian psychoanalysis and the ethics of narrative film. It demonstrates how spectators engage with narrative film, undergoing unconscious processes that generate a shift in the adherence to fantasies that impede assuming responsibility for one's fate and well being, as well as fantasies that cover over historical and social atrocities or injustices.
The authors discuss the affinities that the ontology and aesthetics of narrative film share with subjective, unconscious processes, offering new insights into the popular appeal of narrative film, through three film corpora, analyzed at length: body-character-breach films; gender-crossing films; and dreaming-character films. With a range of case studies from the old (North by Northwest, Some Like it Hot, Victor Victoria) to the new (Shutter Island, Her, Dallas Buyers Club), Sandra Meiri and Odeya Kohen Raz build on current psychoanalytic ideas about the cinema and take them in a completely new direction that promises to be the basis for further developments in the field.