To be a theoretician of the cinema, one should ideally no longer love the cinema and yet still love it: have loved it a lot and only detached oneself from it by taking it up again from the other end, taking it as the target for the very same scopic drive which had made one love it. (Metz 1982: 15)
And this year I shall have to articulate what serves as the linchpin of everything that has been instituted on the basis of analytic experience: love. (Lacan 1999: 39)
You know what a love letter is? It’s a bullet from a fuckin’ gun, fucker. You receive a love letter from me, you’re fucked forever…You understand, Fuck? (Frank Booth to Jeffrey Beaumont in Blue Velvet (1986))
Figure 1: Dorothy Vallens performing at The Slow Club, Blue Velvet (1986).
As far as I recall, I first became aware of David Lynch’s work in 1986/7. I do not remember exactly when as I do not keep a diary and, as a result, my understanding or recording of time and memory is not archived in any logically structured written format. Consequently my memories ebb and flow in ways which disturb any logical sense of diachronic understanding, but I will give you my recollections of that first encounter which was when Blue Velvet came out and I went to see a screening at the Anvil cinema in Sheffield. The Anvil was the precursor and poor cousin of the Showroom, the current state-of-the-art independent cinema which is situated in the Cultural Industries Quarter of the city. Prior to the opening of the Showroom the Anvil was the place to see independent and non-mainstream films. It consisted of three small screens situated at ground-floor level beneath the Grosvenor House Hotel in the city centre.
I used to enjoy going to this cinema on a Saturday afternoon, for a treat after a heavy week’s work, when it was relatively quiet and one could really enjoy the film in a half-filled auditorium. It always felt such an illicit pleasure being ensconced in the darkened space, knowing that daylight was blocked out while so many people went about shopping, socializing and generally fulfilling the demands of quotidian life outside. On the occasion I first saw Blue Velvet I remember that it was a pleasantly warm day as I drove in to the city centre. In some ways, now that I come to write about it, it feels as if it was recent, not over twenty years ago. I remember being excited, as usual, going in to buy my ticket and taking a seat mid-way back from the screen, my preferred obsessional location. As I recall there were only about twelve other people there, one of whom, a middle-aged man, walked out half-way through.
The auditorium was small and comforting and lined with heavy red velvet drapes. They had a thick texture intended to blot out sounds from the other auditoria. This textural quality was then uncannily echoed in the title sequence of the film as the close-up shots of blue velvet softly rustles like animistic tree bark. The only difficulty I had with the venue was the acoustics, because even with these drapes one could sometimes hear sounds from the film in the adjoining auditorium, and I seem to recall some annoyance at one stage as strange, muffled, uninvited sounds from another film broke through the party wall to my left-hand side. But again, in retrospect, this seems completely apposite to the experience of watching Blue Velvet. Indeed this whole recollection of seeing the film feels most peculiarly ‘Lynchian’.
At the end of the screening I remember feeling stunned, baffled and yet elated. I remained seated for some time trying to make sense of what I had just seen. Eventually, I put on my coat and walked slowly out of the auditorium. But I did not want to go home or even leave the cinema building straightaway. And I was not the only one. As I milled about near the sales counter I remember that there was a group of three women nearby to my right who huddled together in shock to discuss what they had seen. I remember that one of the women, crouching on her haunches, was visibly upset. I seem to recall the tenor of their talk as I (illicitly) listened in like Jeffrey Beaumont, becoming a character from a Lynchian film that had started after the screening had ended, or more probably continued beyond the screening, giving the film an afterlife in the rapidly becoming post-industrial steel city of Sheffield and not the timber town of Lumberton, to see if I could make sense of my experience through their comments. Most of the talk revolved around the ‘primal scene’ of Frank Booth with Dorothy Vallens as Jeffrey watches from the slatted wardrobe doors. I have put ‘primal scene’ in quotation marks because this was not a term that I was aware of at the time and which has only come to make sense for me subsequently in light of my readings around this film.
While the group of women were undeniably shocked by this scene they also appeared to feel that it, and the film generally, offered an insight into the darker recesses of the psyche which, although problematic to them, articulated complexities of sexuality and sexual difference that were not often shown in mainstream cinema. Feeling that I, like Jeffrey, was voyeuristically taking advantage of my situation by watching and listening into their conversation and not knowing if I too was becoming ‘a detective or a pervert’,1 I left the cinema and in a delightfully bewildered state drove home.
Re-reading the paragraphs above I am aware that there is a great deal of retrospective commentary on this scene, my cinematic primal scene, you could say. At the time I do not think I had any detailed comprehension of the complexities of what I had witnessed, but that its effect/affect over me was such that I desperately wanted to watch the film again, which I did the following week. Following that I became more interested in hunting out Lynch’s work. I remember, shortly afterwards, seeing the poster for his first feature film Eraserhead and being transfixed by the image of Henry Spencer, but it was not until much later that I saw the film. I also recall reading some of the advanced information for Twin Peaks which caught my attention. I soon became an avid follower of both the television series and the resultant ‘prequel’ feature film, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. Since that initial introduction to Lynch’s work I have kept a close eye out for his output in its various forms.
I think it is true to say that seeing Blue Velvet that afternoon, and wanting to know more or understand something of what I had seen, was one of the reasons for my initial entry into my mature academic life in film studies, art history and cultural studies. This body of work is, therefore, the ‘Lynchpin’ for my own, cinematic analytical experience.
For a long time much more was known about Lynch’s films and work on television than his painting and other artwork. Partly this was due to Lynch’s desire to safeguard his art against accusations of ‘Celebrity Painting’ (quoted in Rodley 1997: 28). However, in recent years, due to an increased awareness about his overall creative output with the publication of his books, Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness and Creativity in 2006 and Images in 1994; numerous exhibitions of his work shown in the United States, Japan and Europe (such as David Lynch: The Air is on Fire held at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris in 2007, which gave European audiences a privileged opportunity to assess the range of his artistic output); his website DavidLynch.com and videos/DVDs such as Pretty As a Picture, Dynamic:01 The Best of DavidLynch.com and Lynch (One); there is generally much greater knowledge about his overall practice and the relationship between his film and television work and his other wide-ranging artistic endeavours.
In a story that he has repeated many times over the years, Lynch tells us that he started to make films when he was a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of Arts in Philadelphia in the mid-1960s. One day as he was working in his studio he stood back from an ‘almost all-black painting’ and recounts that:
I’m looking at this figure in the painting, and I hear a little wind, and see a little movement. And I had a wish that the painting would really be able to move, you know, some little bit. And that was it. (Quoted in Rodley 1997: 37)
At this moment he ‘imagined a world in which painting would be in perpetual motion. I was very excited and began to make films which looked like moving paintings, no more and no less’ (quoted in Chion 2006: 9).
The genesis of his film practice via his ‘visionary’ engagement with one of his paintings is central, I would argue, to an understanding of this body of work. It is not tangential to it or only of minor significance; it helps to place the films within a fine art context and sensibility which needs to be accounted for in any critical analysis. His first ‘film’, Six Men Getting Sick (1967), produced when he was a second-year student, consisted of a specially designed sculpture-screen, the surface of which contained reliefs in the shape of heads and arms cast from Lynch’s body by his friend Jack Fisk, onto which a one-minute film loop was projected. The animated film painting appeared on the screen in such a way that the sculpted heads appeared to be transformed into stomachs which caught fire and then vomited, with a siren being used as the soundtrack to the piece (Figure 2).
Film allowed Lynch to add movement and sound to the muteness and static nature of his paintings as well as an opportunity to extend beyond their frame. The interconnection between painting, movement and sound is integral to all of his subsequent film work. From his initial experiments he was encouraged to make a grant application to the American Film Institute which gave him a place and money to start work on Eraserhead.
In terms of translating paintings into narrative sequences for film, Lynch has adhered to the teaching of Frank Daniel, Dean of the Czechoslovakian Film School, who taught him at the American Film Institute to construct films by putting down ideas for 70 scenes on three-inch by five-inch cards. This method of constructing film allows for discontinuity and a break up in the linear pattern of narrative and in part, I would argue, accounts for the emphasis upon the visual (and acoustic) rather than reliance upon Hollywood narrative and generic structures in this body of work.2
Figure 2: Still from Six Men Getting Sick (1967).
There does appear to be a developing acknowledgement of the importance of painting upon Lynch’s films. In Greg Olson’s magisterial biographical study, David Lynch: Beautiful Dark, he remarks that ‘Many of Lynch’s films are more like cinematic paintings than literary constructs, canvases vibrant with an action-painter’s abstract strokes of mood and atmosphere, bold splashes of surging grief, desire, fear, and love’ (Olson 2008: 188). And he goes on to remark that ‘Lynch’s modus operandi remains that of a painter…treating a film set like an unfinished canvas that he’s still actively adding to’ as the work develops via intuition and experimentation rather than detailed planning (Olson 2008: 289). Lynch’s most recent film, INLAND EMPIRE (2006), is manifestly even more experimental than his previous work, and on the DVD Lynch (One) he details the open nature of the filmmaking process which developed intuitively without an overall plan to guide it. In terms of the artist’s intentionality, Lynch’s devotion to transcendental meditation, with the opportunity to delve into an ocean of pure consciousness that he links to the unified field of modern science, can account for some of this willingness to embrace chance in the making of the work and the prospects for it all coming together in the end, but it does not account for the full complexity of the works’ meaning(s). As Lynch acknowledges, ‘What I would be able to tell you about my intentions in my films is irrelevant. It’s like digging up someone who died over four hundred years ago and asking them to tell you about his book’ (quoted in Chion 2006: 114).
We need, however, to consider the relationship between art and film, between still and moving images and a range of theoretical positions, if we are to engage fully with these film paintings. The contemporary French philosopher Jacques Rancière makes the point that:
Cinema, like painting and literature, is not just the name of an art whose processes can be deduced from the specificity of its material and technical apparatuses. Like painting and literature, cinema is the name of an art whose meaning cuts across the borders between the arts. (Rancière 2006a: 4, emphasis in the original)
So while there is a necessary requirement to think about the specificity of film as we engage with Lynch’s cinema, I would also argue that we have to think about the relationship between film and other art forms to consider fully the ramifications of the work. In the catalogue to the exhibition of Lynch’s artwork in Paris in 2007, the philosopher Boris Groys argues that Lynch has transposed the tragic tradition of European modernism of twentieth-century art in the work of the expressionists and the surrealists onto film through the (re)-narrativization of the modernist image. As such, Groys suggests that:
The modernist image comes into existence through a struggle against any kind of narrativity; Lynch, however, began to integrate apparently modernist images into his stories quiet early on. I would consider this (re)-narrativization of the modernist image to be the main method employed by Lynch in his paintings and drawings, as well as his films. (Groys and Ujica 2007: 108–109)
This dialectic between stasis and movement, between painting and film, between the autonomous image and diachronic narrative, thereby provides us with the opportunity to reflect on Lynch’s work within a much wider framework than has perhaps been offered so far in the critical engagements with these film paintings.
There is a substantial and growing body of secondary materials about Lynch’s films.3 This attests to the intriguing nature of these works and their importance in debates about contemporary issues in critical theory, together with the passionate attachments of the writers to Lynch’s cinema. Many of the books follow a linear trajectory tracing the auteur’s signature as it develops across the individual films. As many of the secondary sources on Lynch regard him as an auteur I feel that I need to consolidate my views on this term, to position myself from the outset, so that I do not have to keep returning to it throughout. Broadly, I adopt positions from Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault in relation to the figure of the author. Barthes’ argument about the death of the author are well known, and indeed contested. In several quarters there have been attempts to bring the author back in to the frame (see, for example, Burke 1998). However, as Barthes (1977: 148) writes, ‘Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing’. However, Foucault’s explication of the notions of the author’s name and the author function shows just how difficult it is to completely dispose of these ideas. As Adrian Rifkin (2000: 5) puts it in his book on Ingres,
in Michel Foucault’s terms, the concept of an author is a notion, one that we need, but that we must also try to set aside. For if we allow this notion to be invaded by its other, by an uncontainable otherness, its specific form might be newly refigured.
A great many of the secondary sources on Lynch seek to restrict the meaning of the work to the figure of the auteur. So while several critics are captivated, for instance, by the aesthetic strategies of the work, they can pull back from any unconstrained admiration or distance themselves from any accusations of misogyny or racism levelled at the content by saying that it is all the fault of Lynch as author. This seems to me to be of limited use critically. Seeking to constrain meaning to Lynch as auteur, in whatever guise, is to limit the potential for these texts to be read alongside others, and thus allow us to refigure the archive in more productive ways.
Indeed, in thinking about a body of work in which art and film are so closely intertwined leads me on to consider the role of theory in the analyses that follow. ‘The golden age of cultural theory is long past’ Terry Eagleton (2004: 1) tells us in After Theory. And the plethora of books which celebrate this fact, or bemoan it, argue that the idea of an overarching metanarrative has disappeared. Eagleton goes on to write, in his analysis of the current state of academic thinking, ‘For the moment, however, we are still trading on the past – and this in a world which has changed dramatically since Foucault and Lacan first settled to their typewriters. What kind of fresh thinking does the new era demand?’ (Eagleton 2004: 2).
For some film studies theorists, such as David Bordwell and Noël Carroll in the ‘post-theory’ camp, the end of high theory is to be celebrated, where the straightjacket of certain orthodoxies are to be replaced by more middle-ground approaches. However, it is not so easy to dispose of what has gone before; cultural amnesia is not an easy operation, I am pleased to say. It is useful to rethink theory, what it is and what it can do, rather than to reject, wholesale, what has gone before. Martin Jay (1998: 19) points out that many of the anti-theory approaches can ‘be traced back to the classical Greek meaning of theoria as a visually determined contemplation of the world from afar’. This sense of the all-seeing, Godlike gaze of the theorist, of the scopic regime of ‘Cartesian perspectivism’ standing back from the object of study, is one that is hard to support. But, as Jay goes on to argue:
The larger point I want to make is that what we call ‘theory’ is a moment of reflexive self-distancing, a moment that subverts the self-sufficient immanence of whatever we happen to be talking about. It is precisely such internal distance that, pace certain neopragmatists, prevents even beliefs from being so seamlessly undisturbed by what are allegedly outside of them. For the very dichotomy of inside and outside is itself replicated within the seemingly immanent system of belief. As Niklas Luhmann has often argued, every system contains its own blind spots, its own paradoxical assumptions, which prevent the observer from being totally within or completely outside its boundaries. Those who yearn for an entirely immanent position are as deluded as those who think they can find one that is entirely transcendent. Their dreams of undisturbed plenitude are themselves fantasies of mastery, moves in the game of desiring control, that are ultimately as vain as those they attribute to the purveyors of theory. For absolute proximity is as hard to come by as that unbridgeable spectatorial distance supposedly allowing theoretical contemplation from afar. (Jay 1998: 28)
I start this study from a position of closeness to the images and sounds of Lynch’s films, from a position of love and (over)proximity. As I seek to pull back, to gain a critical distance from the object of study, the images and sounds might be like those of two rack-focused shots moving from foreground to the middle ground and rear distance, and back again. The illusionary sense of theoretical speculation might be thought of as a sense of deep-focus, hoping to take in all the planes of representation at once. However, as Jay’s quotation above points out, the desire for theoretical completion, of total knowledge, is as illusory as that of ‘intuitive’ knowledge unburdened by theory. The important ‘hermeneutic’ arts of ‘looking’, ‘listening’ and ‘reading’, with their intimate and proximate relation to the object of study (Jay 1998: 25) need to be integrated with the Other of theory to develop fully the act of writing about film and art.
So, as I seek to stand back from these films I love there is an immediate sense of the impossibility of maintaining that illusionary mastery, and so one has to confront one’s passionate attachment to these films – what is it that draws me back, again and again, to Lynch’s films? The texts themselves do not change, but the ways in which they are experienced do. So, for example, I first saw the films at the cinema but now I have access to them via DVD where they can be watched whenever I like, either in their entirety or else I can fixate upon a favourite image or scene. In The Remembered Film Victor Burgin (2004: 8) writes that the ‘arrival of the domestic video cassette, and the distribution of industrially produced films on videotape, put the material substrate of the narrative into the hands of the audience’. The avant-garde ambulatory dérive of André Breton’s and Jacques Vaché’s random visits to movie houses in Nantes early in the history of cinema can now be experienced by viewers at home with access to domestic computer and television equipment. As Burgin (2004: 8) puts it, ‘their once avant-garde intervention has, in Victor Shklovsky’s expression, “completed its journey from poetry to pose”. The decomposition of narrative film, once subversive, is now normal’. However, when we consider Lynch’s films we have the added complication of seeking to contend with the audience’s ability to intervene in an already problematized narrative structure, which raises interesting questions about the implications of the complexities of narrative and genre conventions in these works, the poetics of Lynch’s fine art sensibility, and the viewer’s own critical engagement and interaction with these filmic texts. So, rather than looking for meaning in the guise of the auteur we could think about other ways in which these films might allow for meanings to arise. In the first instance all I can talk about is my responses to these films, my obsessional fixations upon key images, shots, scenes, sequences and themes that emerge from my ongoing engagement with this body of work to which I return time and time again like a moth to a flame, burning with desire to see and experience again in these reiterations something that I love and long for. In his writings on film, the French philosopher Jean-Louis Schefer states that:
It’s not likely that my experience of film is an entirely isolated one. Indeed, rather than the illusion of movement or mobility in filmic objects, the illusion proper to cinema is that this experience and this memory are solitary, hidden, secretly individual, since they make an immediate pact (story, pictures, affective colours) with a part of ourselves that lives without expression; a part given over to silence and to a relative aphasia, as if it were the ultimate secret of our lives – while perhaps it really constitutes our ultimate subjecthood. It seems that in this artificial solitude a part of us is porous to the effects of meaning without ever being able to be born into signification through language. We even recognize there – and to my eyes this is the imprescritible link between film and fear – an increase in the aphasia of feelings in our social being (the cinema acting upon every social being as if upon one social being). (Schefer 1995: 112)
And it is this part of us that lives without expression where cinema is so affecting and may account for its hold over so many. So when we look for meaning there is often a belief, in certain theoretical approaches, that it lies somewhere hidden, to be discovered by the diligent observer who can lead others to the ‘truth’ of the film which, once revealed, will shine light upon darkness and make the subject clear once and for all. In Lynch’s work the complexity of the narrative structure of many of the films seems to resist this type of approach, the polysemy of the cinematic signs seemingly preclude such conclusions being inferred. Roland Barthes offers a corrective to this type of reductive thinking when he writes that:
Text means Tissue; but whereas hitherto we have always taken this tissue as a product, a ready-made veil, behind which lies, more or less hidden, meaning (truth), we are now emphasizing, in the tissue, the generative idea that the text is made, is worked out in a perpetual interweaving; lost in this tissue – this texture – the subject unmakes himself, like a spider dissolving in the constructive secretions of its web. Were we fond of neologisms, we might define the theory of the text as an hyphology (hyphos is the tissue and the spider’s web). (Barthes 1975: 64)
Lynch’s films straddle a number of borders between film and fine art. The films reference avant-garde artistic practice and they also operate within mainstream cinema, although at its edges, which perhaps explains, to a degree, Lynch’s status within the Hollywood film industry. The form and style of these works, rather than suggesting lack of narrative comprehension or being split between form and content, as some of the commentators have suggested, might actually attest to a more overdetermined relationship between film, art and (post)modernity. As such, the approach I intend to take might allow us to tease out some interesting connections and ideas that may have been overlooked thus far. For most of the materials to date relate to the complete works of Lynch and the monographs, at least, tend to provide a chronological review and commentary on each film. I do not wish to deny the validity of such an approach as this has produced interesting work. In a sense it has freed the field up so that other areas of research and reflection can be investigated. The themes or concepts under consideration have arisen as part of the research process and of my love of these films. These are not ideas I want to impose on the texts as a way of ‘proving’ theory; rather, they are ideas that have come to light during the process of thinking about this body of work and trying to find productive and useful means of working with the texts – of putting theory to work and of delving into my own passionate engagement with Lynch’s films.
In terms of my methodology, I am drawn towards a range of contemporary approaches to art writing which offer exciting ways of engaging with the art object (in ways which obliterate any false binary oppositions between still or moving images, fine art or film, high or low), and which openly acknowledge the writer’s preferences. For instance, Adrian Rifkin proposes, in a recent article, that he wants to:
set out anew from the notion of liking or a preference, of liking art or preferring one kind of art or work of art to another so much that one wants to write about art, to work on it or with it. I want to find the beginnings of something I call freedom and even an equality of value in arriving at the moment of a desire to work rather than from a predictive theory. (Rifkin 2009: 809)
Similarly, T.J. Clark’s sustained personal engagement with two of Poussin’s paintings in The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing (2006) actively engages with his personal responses to these paintings over a prolonged period of looking, reflecting and writing. At one point he writes:
When I am in front of a picture the thing I want is to enter the picture’s world: it is the possibility of doing so that makes pictures worth looking at for me. Though of course the process of looking in egocentric, and I write ‘I’ all the time, the moment that the looking and writing are always waiting for is that of being in the picture’s place – within the structure of experience the picture opens up for others to inhabit…Pictures have depths as well as surfaces, yes, but they don’t have to be ‘my’ depths. (Clark 2006: 222, emphasis in the original)
Likewise, Mieke Bal, in her work Louise Bourgeois’ ‘Spider’: The Architecture of Art-Writing, makes the important point that:
Writing about art is not a substitute for the art. Rather than standing in for the visual objects, texts about them ought, in the first place, to lead the reader (back) to those objects. Instead of being a substitute, a good text about art is a supplement to it. If all goes well, it unpacks some – and only points to others – of the many facets of that visual work of art. (Bal 2001: xii, emphasis in the original)
The acknowledgement of one’s personal preference or commitment to certain images does not have to mean that the writing has to be solipsistic, but rather that it states a preference from the outset and then works from that point out into the (social) world. And as the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan has pointed out, to arrive at that Cartesian point where one can say ‘I’ involves a great deal of work, most of which is repressed from us. In addition, Lacan’s critique of science via set theory also suggests that an acknowledgement of our desire is vital if we are to move beyond a false belief in impartial objectivity. However, having said that, we also need to integrate the personal with the social if we are to engage fully with the potential the images and sounds we work with provide us a platform for. So, I start from an acknowledgement of my personal preferences and love for Lynch’s films and the worlds created in these works, which I too want to inhabit, and I want others to inhabit as well. In addition, I want to consider these films from within film theory, but also to extend their frame of reference into other areas of critical reflection, to see where these threads might lead us. The best I can hope for, as Bal suggests, is to unpack some of their complexities and (hopefully) lead the reader back to the films to experience (again) the excitement I have encountered in my engagement with these cinematic film visions.
Bearing these points in mind, in Chapter 1, I want to focus upon my own passionate attachment or fixation upon the final scene in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me with Agent Cooper and Laura Palmer in the Red Room. This is a scene I often return to, either by watching the entire film to let the narrative take me there, or else by using the scene selection to bypass the rest of the film and to allow me to immerse myself in a form of melancholic bliss. By starting from an intense love of this scene I want to unpack the complex levels of meaning available in this synecdoche.
In contrast to this close reading of a small extract from one film, Chapter 2 is taken up with an investigation of excess in Lynch’s films, and in particular, the themes of tears and time within the work. This will give us the opportunity to refer to a number of films and relate these Lynchian examples to discussions and debates about genre and emotion in film, as well as providing the opportunity to consider how Lynch uses tears across the entire body of his films.
Chapter 3 takes as its starting grid, and point of departure, the road and vehicles within Lynch’s films. In comparing these texts to other road movies I will be using films from the 1940s through the 1960s and 1970s, Detour (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1945), Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969) and Vanishing Point (Richard C. Sarafian, 1971). By using examples of other road movies I will consider how Lynch’s films relate to the tropes of the road movie, to compare and contrast these films with other examples of the genre, to ascertain whether Lynch’s films are inherently conservative as some commentators have suggested or, rather, whether they are symptomatic of the genre itself.
In Chapter 4, I take the psychoanalytic theory of Nachträglichkeit or deferred action (après-coup in Lacanian terminology), to investigate the logic of narrative and trauma in several of Lynch’s films. Taking Lost Highway as my starting point I will relate how the theory of deferred action of trauma can be related to other films by reference, inter alia, to Hiroshima mon amour (Alain Renais, 1959) and Detour (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1945). By looking at European art cinema and Hollywood B-movies I hope to be able to place Lynch’s work within a wider view of film history than has previously been considered.
Chapter 5 is directed towards the uncanny and its role within this entire body of work. Several commentators (Mulvey 1996; Rodley 1997 and Vidler 1992) have discussed the important role the uncanny takes on in these works, as being immanent within them rather than as themes or motifs. I will be focusing upon a selection of extracts from a variety of the films. By starting with Freud’s essay Das Unheimliche, (‘The “Uncanny”’ of 1919), and relating this to Lynch’s work via a large body of writings on the subject, including Nicholas Royle’s (2003) book The Uncanny, I hope to be able to contribute to an understanding of the role of the uncanny in contemporary discourse and the fundamentally uncanny nature of film ontologically.
In Chapter 6 I want to think about Lynch’s most recent film, INLAND EMPIRE (2006) and his work on DavidLynch.com, to look at the re-emergence of ‘film paintings’ in contemporary culture via an examination of the ways in which avant-garde practices are now encased within digital technology. In so doing, I want to explore the impact of these technological changes upon critical theory and Lynch’s position within contemporary cultural discourse bearing in mind that his practice has been one of producing film paintings from the outset.
As a point of departure into the main body of this study I would like to refer to Sigmund Freud’s introduction to the Wolf Man case in which he reminded himself of ‘the wise saying that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy’ (Freud 1991b: 239). Likewise Major Briggs repeats this saying in Twin Peaks after Leland Palmer’s death as a means of seeking to come to terms with the traumatic events encountered. In between these iterations and beyond into the present we have our philosophy and critical theory as it currently exists, which will form the basis of the deliberations that follow. While we contend with current thought we should perhaps bear in mind Deleuze’s (1988: 97) comments on Foucault’s work that ‘The unthought is therefore not external to thought but lies as its very heart, as that impossibility of thinking which doubles or hollows out the inside’.
1. ‘I don’t know if you’re a detective or a pervert’ is the phrase that Sandy says to Jeffrey in Blue Velvet just before he lets himself into Dorothy’s flat. Tellingly, he replies ‘That’s for me to know and you to find out’.
2. In 2001 I delivered a paper entitled ‘Frame by Frame: The “Film Paintings” of David Lynch’ at the Association of Art Historians 27th Annual Conference: Making Connections, 29 March–1 April, held at Oxford Brookes University, in the session ‘Still/Moving Pictures: Art History and Film’. In the paper I used the notion of ‘film paintings’ to read extracts from a number of Lynch’s films, to problematize the auteur theory in respect of this body of work and its relationship to fine art practice and theory.
3. In summary, there appear to be approximately five main approaches to Lynch’s work in the secondary sources. I am aware that I may be doing these writers a grave disservice by lumping them together into general categories, but, these fictive nets, like Roland Barthes’ (1977: 33) photographic example of ‘Italianicity’ in his analysis of a Panzani advertisement, are to act as metaphoric containers for a variety of ingredients of ‘Lynchicity’, from which the ingredients may spill out as one form of excess among others in the archive.
One main strand of critical response is that of David Lynch as an undoubted auteur. In this respect there are a number of approaches all of which analyse the films chronologically. One approach is to regard the work as aesthetically progressive but conservative in terms of subject matter (Alexander 1993; Andrew 1998; Atkinson 1997; Kaleta 1993). For these writers, Lynch’s work is stylistically exciting but the aesthetic ‘hides’ a deeper conservatism. So, for instance, Alexander argues that Lynch’s work is inherently conservative behind its slick, postmodern veneer. But, what if the postmodern veneer is actually conservative? If we then look to Fredric Jameson’s (1991: 295) work on nostalgia film we can see that these formal, aesthetic contradictions have ‘a social and historically symbolic significance of its own’. In Jameson’s analysis this significance is to act as a parable of the end of the theories of transgression as well. Other writers adopting an auteurial approach are in the main much more supportive of the work (Chion 1995 and 2006; Hughes 2001; Le Blanc and Odell 2000; Odell and Le Blanc 2007; Olson 2008; Rodley 1997 and 1999; Sheen and Davison (eds) 2004; Stewart 2007; Wilson 2007 and Woods 1997).
A second approach finds both the form and context conservative and reactionary (Darke 1994; Dargis 1995; Johnson 2004; Shattuc 1992; Willis 1997). For these commentators there is not much to recommend in Lynch’s universe. The aesthetics of the work are part and parcel of the misogynistic, racist, anti-disabled, patriotic and puritanical underpinning of the films’ meanings.
The third approach reads the work as attesting to a form of ‘New Age’ wholeness (Nochimson 1997 and 2007). This form of Jungian reading is one that 
i
ek (2000) forcefully rejects.
The fourth approach is one in which Lynch’s work can be read differently or ‘otherwise’ (Creed 1988; Mulvey 1996; Stern 1991), which provides opportunities for feminist and other critical approaches to develop further their analyses beyond the constraints of any perceived conservatism of the work to explore the connotations in much more detail.
The fifth approach reads the work from Lacanian and other psychoanalytic perspectives and is, in part, a response and reaction to some of these other approaches (iek 1994, 1995, 2000, 2001a, 2001b; McGowan 2000, 2004, 2007a and 2007b).
