A Phantasy isn’t primarily a cut-out animation. Instead it employs a technique McLaren called “chain of mixes” that involves cross-dissolves between still images. But it is a dream-like pastel landscape, reminiscent of the dream-like landscapes of many Surrealist painters, particularly Yves Tanguy in his work from the 1930s.

One can imagine a viewer from the 1950s (or today) dismissing A Phantasy as a slight pastiche of a certain painterly Surrealism, one that gets everything wrong. Here, McLaren would be a silly fag who merely decorates over things rather than digging deep into the psychic, sexual, paranoid dream images. In my reading, which is perhaps equally reductive, McLaren redeems the stupid patriarchal excesses and false profundities of mid-century Surrealism through an act of queering.

2.
Under the influence of Dalí, Yves Tanguy’s paintings began to change in the 1930s. Already they often depicted various mysterious, disagreeable objects—mechanical and biomorphic—isolated, weapon-like on a desolate, ambiguously crepuscular (though there might be strong shadows, as if imported from de Chirico), horizonless desert. But then, as in Dalí’s work, the edges became harder, the paintings moving toward a more precise mimeticism (not photographic, really, but moving in that direction).

Tanguy also took up Dalí’s conceptual framework, exemplified by the paranoiac-critical method. The first step of this method: the artist works themself (really: himself) into a paranoid state, convincing himself they are under siege—their subjectivity, here still somehow defined as their sanity, challenged, broken down as the artist convinces himself that they are being attacked, undermined, and manipulated by malicious outside forces. While under this paranoia, the objects and images the artist would employ in their work expand to include their phantom others. Artworks now employ both “realistic” everyday objects and images, and “surrealistic” phantom objects and images. It takes phantoms to reveal truer, uncanny meanings. Phantoms are the results of unconscious acts. As such, they reveal—perhaps more clearly than any other method can, the argument went—our unconscious.

3.
The second step of the paranoiac-critical method is less theorized: after the moment of delirium, sanity returns, and the artwork can be apprehended critically. But Dalí makes a strange and intriguing claim: through the critical part of the paranoiac-critical method, the subjective becomes objective. He describes it as “a spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based on the critical and systematic objectivity of the associations and interpretations of delirious phenomena.”³ That is, once the paranoid subjectivity of the artist produces works that include objects and images that have been transformed to phantom objects and images, one might gain an objective “knowledge,” a knowledge based on associations (of and between the phantoms) and interpretations (of the artwork, presumably). But one could say this basic move—from subjective raw material to the possibility of an objective interpretation of a finished artwork—is not unique to the paranoiac-critical method.

4.
I take Dalí more seriously than most. Still, one must admit that the paintings transmit a kind of teenage death drive to placate a castration anxiety based on voyeurism, masturbation, and humiliation. If we don’t care for these paintings so much today, it is because they embarrass us. Their profundities, their “mysteries,” are so juvenile, so masculine. Tanguy is a bit more restrained in this respect: classier, with a few more gestures toward abstraction.

5.
A Phantasy looks like it falls in line with mid-century Surrealism and the paranoiac-critical method. It doesn’t. It turns most aspects around, queers them.

In Surrealism, the weapon-like phallic shapes may be biomorphic, but end up resolutely inorganic. This is the death drive. McLaren reverses this: the stone-like objects come alive when touched by arrows: they evolve, they change colour, they admit light.

In Surrealism, however crowded the canvas is, each object remains isolated. And perfectly still, more still than statuary. (This is also the case in some Surrealist animations, in which movement is limited, tentative, isolating.) In A Phantasy, things grow and dance; light is created, arrows and butterflies soar through the air. When a still bird is split in two by an arrow, a glowing heart is produced. By the standards of Surrealism, this is kitsch, pure kitsch. Butterflies and hearts!

6.
In the central part of the animation, we travel up from the desert to the sky, where six spheres do a celestial dance. (McLaren reused some of this, years later, in Spheres [1969].) We can see here where McLaren’s core interests lie: formal abstraction, joy, wonder. But then we fall back down to earth, and the shapes become anthropomorphic (the spheres begin to look like heads), and McLaren really has nowhere to go, but further growth and the suggestion of some kind of wedding/funeral at the end. As night falls, two objects glow and move together as a gravestone-like marker, spraying light rays, announces “FINIS.”

7.
For queers, castration is secondary. For gays, the phallus is less a weapon than a fountain. Check out George Tooker’s Fountain, from 1950. This is the image I want to set in relation to A Phantasy.