Mal’s “second death” causes her to be placed within the dichotomy of attainableness and unattainableness. Slavoj Žižek provides the framework for the notion of the “second death”; the deaths can be symbolic or physical (21-22). With Mal, we run into an issue as she dies more than twice throughout the course of the film. Which deaths, in accordance with Žižek, becomes her first and second death? Žižek asserts the “second death” as a “radical catastrophe” or as something which relates directly to a “traumatic attachment” of a “Thing” (37). The moment in which Mal falls from the window ledge fits this theory nicely; in other words, Cobb’s attachment to the “Thing,” Mal, transforms into a traumatic attachment through death. We can then argue that
