Fantasy has had a lot of bad press. 


but the concept has little to do with those common sense notions of it as an 'escape from reality.' It deconstructs that fantasy/reality opposition by drawing attention to the activity of fantasy in everyday life experience, of which day-dreaming is only one common manifestation. Rather than dismiss this activity as trivial supplements to the real they must be seen as central to any thinking about images for a politics of representation that acknowledges 'physical reality' - the reality in which the human mind is not an objective decoding machine but a physical apparatus that is selective and motivated in its activity. For it must surely be here in the intersection of social identity with fantasy , and the unconscious with cultural identification that Mise-en-scène takes on its full import as the staging of desire.