Figure 19: Opening still from Premonitions Following an Evil Deed, Lynch’s contribution to Lumière and Company, (1995).
The uncanny can (and indeed perhaps must) always be exposed as a ‘historical and cultural phenomenon’; but it can (and indeed perhaps must) also, at the same time, be what questions, unsettles and defamiliarizes any ‘ordinary’ sense or understanding of the ‘historical’, the ‘cultural’ and the ‘phenomenon’. (Royle 2003: 161, emphasis in the original)
Psychoanalysis doesn’t provide a new and better interpretation of the uncanny; it maintains it as a limit to interpretation. (Dolar 1991: 19, emphasis in the original)
In 1995, to commemorate the centenary of the Lumière Brothers first ‘motion pictures’, 40 filmmakers, one of whom was David Lynch, were each commissioned to create a 52-second film using the original, restored camera.1 Lynch’s film presents a short, oblique narrative which offers us a timely insight into the relationship of his work to early, ‘primitive’ cinema. The narrative, strangely realized in its form and content, echoes other Lynch films. In particular, the use of long ‘fades’ to black as segmentation is reminiscent of how this device is used, albeit by editing, in Blue Velvet, Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive. Similarly, the non-linear sequencing of the events, coupled with the spectator’s thwarted desire to fully understand what is presented in the various segments and their interrelationship, indicates how Lynch’s films refer to early cinema and alternative conceptions of the possibilities of film, and therefore differ from mainstream cinema’s reliance upon the teleology of linear narratives and genre conventions.
The still (and indeed the film) seems to be a ghostly apparition of other films, which by the logic of deferred action refer back to the beginnings of film, to see those origins again from another angle, from where its trajectory might have been very different, and maybe could become so again. This short piece, from a contemporary perspective, re-presents the strangeness of film while, at the same time, invoking a different narrative trajectory to that integrated in the North American industry. There is a joining together of different film histories, and temporal conjunctions, which provides a means of (re)considering Lynch’s films in relation to this history and contemporary theory and practice. Moreover, if we go back to the beginnings of film we can find other approaches to the medium which suggest its normalization is/was contingent and not inevitable. Referring to the Lumière brother’s first screenings, Sean Cubitt (2004: 15) makes the point that these films presented, in the words of Tom Gunning, an ‘aesthetic of astonishment’ where the cinema event predominated over narrative. In addition, Cubitt (2004: 19) refers to the differences of these films to contemporaneous Edison films produced in North America, of 1884 and 1885, where ‘we find an immediate conforming of cinema with the entertainment industry’ via the anchoring of images to narrative. Elsewhere, Gunning (1995: 62) has shown how in France ‘Méliès main claim to fame comes from grafting the nineteenth-century tradition of magic theater [sic] onto the nascent apparatus of motion pictures’. Therefore, the dominance of narrative to film was not the only paradigm for the emerging industry, its origins in other forms of entertainment and magic provided alternative potential pathways for its development. If we consider these other approaches, we might be able to ascertain how they continue to ‘work’ from within the constraints of the narrative straightjacket, and indeed, how narrative and genre are constantly disturbed and enriched by film’s uncanny supplement. Or, rather, how the ontological strangeness of film eludes the attempts to constrain it.
Cubitt (2004: 38) goes on to say that ‘Narrative, then, is not an essential quality of film, but only a potential and secondary quality arising from the production of time in the differentiation within and between frames’. And in this still (Figure 19) we are perhaps presented with Barthes’ filmic, which for him is only truly present in the (black and white) still, as a palimpsest, where the third, obtuse meaning can be found, where movement has itself been stilled from its cinematic illusion rather than presented as a series of static images. Retroactively, this may allow us to look again at the rest of the body of work to ascertain the connections between Lynch’s use of film and a counter-trajectory to its normalization within Hollywood, and hence Lynch’s place within that history and practice.
The film opens with three police officers walking towards the figure of a dead male body on the ground and then presents us with two very different scenarios, which appear to exist simultaneously on other planes of ‘reality’. We are shown languid images of three women seated on a bench alongside a tree where a doe is tethered, which links into a strange ‘scientific’ experiment/torture scene being carried out by alien figures upon a naked woman submerged in a water tank. The final shots depict the parents of the dead boy at their home awaiting the arrival of the police officer to inform them of their son’s death. I use the word awaiting purposely, for an earlier shot showed the woman look towards the open doorway, then walk towards it and look out to the left in the direction the police officer later enters from, as if she knew that bad news was coming their way; her ‘premonition’ of the evil deed.
In this short piece the strangeness of film is reactivated by Lynch’s creative exploitation of the constraints imposed upon the directors. The film’s narrative, using a murder scene as its manifest framework, also provides a link with the work of Edgar Allan Poe and E.T.A. Hoffmann, through surrealism and film noir, into contemporary versions of noir in the work of Lynch and others. This short film gives us the premonition of the uncanny underside of cinema which has consistently haunted the attempts to normalize it within the North American film industry. However, Sean Cubitt (2004: 4) also remarks that ‘there is something fictive, something uncanny, or something that, however marginally, fails the reality test in even the most engrossing films, and perhaps in them most of all’. And he goes on to contest the normative approach to film put forward by David Bordwell and the ‘posttheorists’ in which all cinema practices are referred to the North American industry as the film style and form, where film’s strangeness is constrained. In contrast, Cubitt seeks to provide a different reading of film by understanding the object of cinema, reading a history of images from a digital perspective for a digital audience, in such a way that ‘to understand the conditions under which we can make the future otherwise than the past or present’ (Cubitt 2004: 12). So, a digital perspective allows us to reinvestigate past images, to ‘see’ them anew, so to speak, and thus to provide the possibility to make things different in the future.2
Using Lynch’s Lumière film here allows us to rethink this body of work; to see it again from another angle, from which it has, in so many critical reactions, been read. I will seek to suggest that the uncanny lies at the core of Lynch’s films. This in itself is not an original notion and many writers have pointed out the interweaving connection of the uncanny in this body of work (Mulvey 1996; Rodley 1997; Vidler 1992). The uncanny, I will argue, pervades Lynch’s work in such a way that its uneasy ‘nonspecificity’, to borrow Rodley’s term, becomes a haunting presence in itself. I will argue that Lynch’s work takes over the mantle of the uncanny as previously traced by critics in the writings of E.T.A. Hoffmann, Hanns Heinz Ewer’s film, The Student of Prague (1913) and the work of the surrealists, among others. The uncanny does not just provide motifs or themes in these texts: it is immanent in the work itself.
In relation to Blue Velvet, for instance, Laura Mulvey (1996: 150) has pointed out that ‘The Oedipal narrative unfolds in a mise-en-scène of the uncanny’, incorporating the gothic within small-town America, which she regards as one of the film’s main triumphs, and that ‘Blue Velvet uses the cinema’s own rhetoric to portray the uncanny’ (Mulvey 1996: 153). I will seek to show that Blue Velvet and most other of Lynch’s films stage the uncanny in ways which supplement any narrative concerns and, as such, can be traced back as examples of another trajectory of film which enriches and supplements the hegemonic, stifling straightjacket of narrative and genre conventions within the North American film industry. For Rodley (1997: ix) ‘the uncanny – in all its nonspecificity – lies at the very core of Lynch’s work’. Similarly, Anthony Vidler (1992: 10) remarks that ‘The domestic and suburban uncanny of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, and, more recently, of his television series “Twin Peaks,” draws its effect from the ironization of all the commonplaces of a half-century of uncanny movies’.
In undertaking this task I will also discuss Lynch’s films alongside The Innocents (Jack Clayton, 1961) as a means of comparing one film which deliberately stages the uncanny in contrast to this body of work, in an attempt to ascertain the similarities and differences between them. This will also allow me to consider the Freddie Francis connection – the cinematographer on The Innocents as well as a number of Lynch’s films (The Elephant Man, Dune and The Straight Story). For Lynch and Francis became good friends while shooting The Elephant Man and Lynch sought him out for other films, perhaps seeing or sensing in his work a unique ability to make strange the familiar. (Interestingly, apart from specific aspects of The Elephant Man and The Straight Story, it can be argued that the films Francis worked on with Lynch are the least uncanny of the body of work.)
Starting with Sigmund Freud’s essay of 1919, I want to consider the intertwined relationship between psychoanalytic theory and film. As Nicholas Royle points out:
Film haunts Freud’s work. It is there in the essay on the uncanny, for example, flickering allusively, elusively, illusively at the edge of the textual screen, in particular in the footnote on the double and the reference to Otto Rank: ‘In [Hanns Heinz] Ewer’s Der Student von Prag [The Student of Prague, 1913], which serves as the starting-point of Rank’s study on the “double”, the hero has promised his beloved not to kill his antagonist in a duel. But on his way to the duelling-ground he meets his “double”, who has already killed his rival’ (U, p. 358, n. 1). Neither here nor anywhere else in the text does Freud spell out the point that Rank’s ‘starting-point’ is in fact film, or what Rank terms a ‘film-drama’ (Rank, p. 4). (Royle 2003: 76)
While Freud’s essay uses a source from literature to read the uncanny (E.T.A.Hoffmann’s ‘The Sandman’), the relationship and interconnection of film and psychoanalysis has been pointed out by many commentators (see, inter alia: Bergstrom 1999, Cubitt 2004 and Lebeau 2001). Indeed, Cubitt (2004: 53) remarks that in the emergent consumer culture of the nineteenth century in which eroticism seeped into the public space, it is ‘no wonder that the spectacle, psychoanalysis and cinema share a birthday’ in relation to the development of commodity fetishism. Otto Rank’s (1971 [1914]) study of the double, which provides many insights into this figure, is inextricably caught up in the specificity of film to represent, or, rather to provide the conditions for releasing uncanny effects, which are, perhaps, medium-specific or more capable of aesthetic realization through film than other static media. And just as Sarah Kofman (1991) takes Freud to task for not fully considering the specificity of literature in his reading of the uncanny, so it is important for us to be aware of the specificity of film in relation to the uncanny as a means of being alive in our readings of the filmic texts.
Nicholas Royle states, in relation to Hoffmann’s short story, which is the basis of Freud’s essay, that:
What ‘The Sandman’ shows, above all perhaps, is that the uncanny is a reading-effect. It is not simply in the Hoffmann text, as a theme (‘spot the uncanny object in this text’) that can be noted and analysed accordingly. The uncanny is a ghostly feeling that arises (or doesn’t arise), an experience that comes about (or doesn’t), as an effect of reading. The uncanny figures as the very impossibility of a so-called thematic reading. (Royle 2003: 44)
When we come to film we have also to attend to the visual and the aural in our readings; to the specifics of the medium in relation to this ghostly feeling. And, for Freud, it should be remembered that:
The uncanny as it is depicted in literature, in stories and imaginative productions, merits in truth a separate discussion. Above all, it is a much more fertile province than the uncanny in real life, for it contains the whole of the latter and something more besides [my emphasis], something that cannot be found in real life. (Freud 1990: 372)
It is this ‘something more besides’ that I want to develop in relation to Lynch’s films. What, for Freud, is this supplement? Why is the uncanny in literature and imaginative productions ‘a much more fertile province’ than real life? And how can these comments relate to film, and, in particular, to Lynch’s texts?
Freud (1990: 341) divides the uncanny, which he defines as ‘that class of the frightening which leads back to what is old and long familiar’ into two categories: one being those factors which arise from our inability to surmount our animistic beliefs (animism, magic and sorcery, and the omnipotence of thoughts) and the other being repressed infantile complexes (for example: the castration complex and womb fantasies). For him:
The uncanny belonging to the first class – that proceeding from forms of thought that have been surmounted – retains its character not only in experience but in fiction as well, so long as the setting is one of material reality...the class of the uncanny which proceeds from repressed complexes is the more resistant of the two. (Freud 1990: 375)
In the final part of his essay he seeks to extend his psychoanalytic understanding of the uncanny to develop and extend aesthetics as it was then understood. Sarah Kofman (1991: 122) suggests that the structure of the essay is itself important in the way in which Freud organizes his materials to provide an argument which emphasizes that what is ‘at stake is a particular case of the repressed...aesthetic pleasure itself also implies the return of repressed infantile fantasies’. She draws attention to the inverted structure of the essay in which he starts with an investigation into the etymological meanings of the word unheimlich and then proceeds to look at actual examples, whereas, in practice, he had started his investigation by recourse to the examples and then considered the various linguistic uses and meanings of the word. So, she suggests, Freud’s argument is with traditional aesthetics itself, not just with an investigation into the reverse of the more elevated sublime, but to show how infantile fantasies are at the core of all aesthetic categories. She goes on to argue that:
It seems that the difference between a work of art that causes pleasure and one that causes uncanniness is the degree to which the repressed content is ‘disguised’: one functions, so to speak, like a normal dream and the other like a nightmare. In the latter case there is a greater degree of recognition of the repressed than the former – hence the dreamer’s anxiety, proceeding from the superego’s inability to accept such an explicit realization of desire. (Kofman 1991: 123)
Ultimately, she argues that while Freud ‘deconstructs the sacred character of art’, he remains trapped within the ‘traditional logic of the sign’ by seeking to stabilize the uncanny with reference to castration anxiety, whereas the radical aspect of his essay is the insistence upon the role of the death drive. In a similar vein Royle points out that:
Freud doesn’t explicitly name the death drive in ‘The Uncanny’ – that doesn’t happen until the following year, with the publication of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. But the death drive lurks, as if forbidden to speak its name, everywhere in the 1919 essay. (Royle 2003: 86)
Royle (2003: 87) goes on to invoke the work of Sarah Kofman and Elisabeth Bronfen in their readings of Freud’s work to argue that
The death drive has to do with the figure of woman...[and] the uncanny commingling of silence, woman and the desirableness of death is quite explicit in the 1913 essay [‘The Theme of the Three Caskets’], even if it falls silent in ‘The Uncanny’ and Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
In a sense most of Lynch’s work can be read as the depiction of a nightmare behind the seemingly idyllic surface of a dream and the position of woman within that structure. If films act like dreamwork, the displacements and condensations of Lynch’s films attest to the dream-like nature of the medium itself. Aesthetics and the uncanny thereby coexist in a Möbius-like structure intertwined via their relationship to infantile fantasies.
Royle (2003: 40) also shows how Freud provides ‘his own “short story” in his summing up of ‘The Sandman’ in which he presents “as if it were an objective, disinterested, merely “factual” summing up”’. What is interesting in respect of the ‘form’ of Hoffmann’s story is the mixture of genres, which appears a useful correlate to consider Lynch’s use of multiple genres. As Royle (2003: 44) writes, ‘“The Sandman” is from the very outset explicitly, self-remarkingly concerned with the performative nature of (its own) language’. And this is something I would like to bear in mind as we read some more extracts from the Lynch corpus, and by taking our extracts from these works we too produce our own doubles or palimpsests in the way in which Barthes describes the filmic.
Rather than seek to consider the theoretical aspects of Freud’s essay as separate from this body of work, and then to relate the discussion to Lynch’s films, I will seek to read these extracts from the film texts, and to consider Freud’s comments and critical commentaries of his essay alongside the extracts, to read from within so to speak, rather than to seek to impose from outside. It appears to me that the uncanny, in its indeterminacy, temporally disturbs boundaries and binaries such as inside/outside and, therefore, I need to find a suitable method for reading/writing about the uncanny (if I can persuade my readers of what I find uncanny), which should itself seek to blur the boundaries between theory and text, between reading and experiencing the uncanny’s indeterminate effects/affects, and therefore become a ‘reading-effect’ in itself.
Moving on from this initial discussion and Lynch’s Lumière film of 1995, via 1895, we come to Jack Clayton’s The Innocents of 1961. The film, based on Henry James’s Gothic novella The Turn of the Screw, visually recreated the ghostly, ambiguously disquieting quality of the original story. I want to pick out certain scenes for discussion here to consider how the unsettling quality of the film is set up for the audience, and the ways in which uncanny effects may be cinematically effected and affecting, to read alongside examples from Lynch’s work.
At the beginning of the film we are introduced to the uncle interviewing Miss Gibbons for the post of governess. This scene, which on one level straightforwardly provides the narrative framework for what is to come, is also haunted by the previous opening shots of Miss Gibbons prior to this as the credits are shown. She is shown in close-up to the left of the frame whispering ‘I only wanted to help the children’. These shots, although given to us at the start are, in actuality, from the end of the film, so we have a prescient warning of her fall from prelapsarian innocence and purity at the interview to the distraught, damaged (and damaging) figure at the end. A warning of what will transpire is given to us at the outset. However, the seemingly straightforward shots used in the following interview scene themselves add to the disquieting aspect of the uncle’s instructions. Although they seem to suggest the utilization of a standard shot/reverse shot pattern, when we look closely we can see that this is never actually the case, these shots do not give us each character’s positioning as one would expect, and this use of camerawork presents a skewed, out-of-time reading. As Neil Sinyard (2000: 95) remarks, the mystery of the previous governess’s death is ‘shrewdly entwined with a sense of the uncle’s heartlessness’ in the way the narrative is delivered to us. At the same time, because of the opening shots, the audience is made acutely aware that Bly has been, and will be again, the site of strange, deadly events, and in a sense we are thereafter on the lookout for any signs that things may be untoward. The audience is put on alert from the start, particularly as Miss Gibbons appears to fall under the uncle’s spell and as director Jack Clayton himself put it, ‘she falls for him in a kind of “enormously Victorian romantic way”’ (quoted in Sinyard 2000: 96).
When the interview scene dissolves4 to Miss Gibbons’ arrival at Bly, the house and gardens look calm and peaceful, apart perhaps from the haunting sounds of Flora’s singing ‘hanging’ in the air. But when Miss Gibbons is introduced by Flora to Mrs Grose, the housekeeper, and she notices the vase of white roses on the table, even before her hand touches them the petals fall off, or as the screenplay so eloquently puts it, ‘shiver off the bloom’ (quoted in Sinyard 2000: 96). This seemingly small and trivial point portentously suggests so much in that, as an unexpected detail, it sets the scene for what is to yet to happen at Bly. This tiny detail, coupled with all the ambiguities in the film, presents the spectator with a mise-en-scène of the uncanny, which escalates as the film progresses. Sinyard suggests that what makes the later appearance of the ghosts so affecting for audiences is that we see Miss Gibbons’ reaction before seeing what she has seen to evoke that reaction. Therefore, cause and effect is reversed so that we are never sure if the ghosts are seen only by her or whether Miles and Flora see them too. Yet, when Miss Gibbons picks up the blackboard with the tear on it in the schoolroom we are given, as Pauline Kael put it, a ‘little pearl of ambiguity’ (quoted in Sinyard 2000: 107). Ambiguity and uncertainty are used throughout the film to destabilize any clear and coherent sense of narrative understanding.
The phrase ‘rooms...used at daylight as if they were dark forests’ spoken by Mrs Grose, indicates the importance and interrelationship between darkness and sexuality in the depiction of the uncanny. The dark forest of sexuality which ought to remain hidden and out of sight, as Freud would put it in his definition of the unheimlich, was brought into the house by the goings on between Quint and Miss Jessel and seen by the children. The ‘unnatural’ knowledge of Miles in particular, which is manifested in the kiss he gives Miss Gibbons is later strangely reciprocated at his death. The ambiguities of the relationships between adults, and between adults and prematurely mature children, help to give The Innocents its manifest sense of strangeness.
Similarly, when Miss Gibbons is in the garden the ambiguity of fear appears at seemingly inappropriate times. So, for instance, when she pulls back the flowers and sees the small statue of a putto everything, at first sight, appears to be peaceful and calm. Yet, immediately after this a large, black bug crawls out of the statue’s mouth from which she recoils in horror and, at the same time, drops her secateurs into the ornamental pond. Yet, the real moment of terror comes after this, when in her heightened state she looks towards the tower and sees the shape or silhouette of a man walking across the ramparts. The bug thereby acts as a metaphoric indicator of the uncanny and lies in a warped relation to metonymy as this scene testifies. The bug, as a ruin of language, provides an eerie sensation like something that has not been named but is experienced without a clear signifier. And, as I write this, unexpectedly, I have a delicious shiver of terror running down my back as I relive this cinematic moment, which comes as a great surprise to me and was both unexpected and uninvited.
In The Innocents the audience is put on edge from the start. The ghostly quality of the film is presented in the ambiguities that overtake certainties which fall away like the rose petals. In Lost Highway, by contrast, at the party at Andy’s house (see Chapter 4 for more detail of this scene), the Mystery Man says to Fred Madison ‘You invited me. It’s not my habit to go where I’m not wanted’. This strange figure is made palpably solid; there is no ambiguity about whether or not he exists, but rather about what he is for Fred. Indeed, he is like the bug in The Innocents, like something that cannot be named, and he occupies a structurally similar position in the film’s narrative and mood. This brings me to another, linked aspect of the uncanny that I now want to focus on – the role of the house as the site of domestic terror, or rather the domestic as an actant in Lynch’s work.
As Anthony Vidler points out, the uncanny is:
Aesthetically an outgrowth of the Burkean sublime, a domesticated version of absolute terror...Its favorite [sic] motif was precisely the contrast between a secure and homely interior and the fearful invasion of an alien presence; on a psychological level, its play was one of doubling, where the other is, strangely enough, experienced as a replica of the self, all the more fearsome because apparently the same. (Vidler 1992: 3)
The relationship between the home and family traumas in Lynch’s work points out a vitally important aspect of the uncanny, the fear of invasion into an overtly secure domestic space from a force which might be in the house all the time. As Roberto Harari (2001: 62) points out in his introduction to Lacan’s seminar on anxiety,
It [the family] is the welcoming, warm nucleus where each person can feel secure and sheltered. Nevertheless, the family is also the place where the subject undergoes the worst experiences (with regard to affects, of the effect of structure) that she or he will suffer.
As such, it is no wonder that the suburban houses in Lynch’s work should contain horror and terror, and that is why they are so uncanny, as their domestic comforts are amplified to such a degree that a parallel discomfort comes into view. The perceived safety of the house is always under threat both from without and within. In Lost Highway, for instance, as discussed in the previous chapter, the Madison home is one in which the exterior structure offers no security against the ‘invasion’ which is produced by the introduction of the video tapes into the domestic space. These technological instances of Fred’s mental state ‘show’ that the danger is in the house all along. The supposedly safe interior, the home, is the site of Fred’s violent jealousy and murderous rage. So while the initial threat appears to come from outside, the spectator experiences the same strangeness of the videos by becoming aware of the ‘performative twisting’ of Fred’s mental state commingled with the architectural structure of the home.
When Renee goes outside into the bright sunlight to collect the newspaper the manila envelope containing the first videotape sits on a lower step. As she takes it into the house she seems startled by Fred’s entry into the room. The video also relates to the porn business that Mr Eddy/Dick Laurent, Andy and Renee are involved in. So when Fred and Renee watch the first tape she appears relieved that it is only black and white footage of the exterior of the house and she nervously says ‘It must be from a real estate agent’. The technology of video, which presents grainy shots of the house is now functionally obsolete and has to all extent and purposes been replaced by digital media. And, like the Lumière camera it is now a reminder of the speed of technological change of capitalist means of representation which re-presents its strangeness via its ever increasing obsolescence. Similarly, the intercom through which Fred hears the message that Dick Laurent is dead is the first means by which the seeming security of the structure is breached. Inside the house, the darkness of the interiors also appears to dissolve the boundaries between fixed objects – the walls and structure of the interior of the house. The boundaries between the heimlich and the unheimlich which, for the most part appear solid and safe, can, very quickly, become permeable, thereby unsettling any rational sense of safety and security. The intrusion of the outside into the house via the intercom and the videos provides a strangely familiar terror which is further signified by Fred’s walk into the darkness prior to Renee’s murder and her call to him down the seemingly endless corridor. Her voice, which echoes as she calls out his name, indicates how the darkness breaks down the boundary between inside and outside, both geographically and psychically. Similarly, in this film, smoke accompanies images of the strangeness of the domestic interior. Anthony Vidler shows how, in a range of stories from Hoffmann to Rimbaud:
smoke is thus an agent of dissolution by which the fabric of the house is turned into the depth of the dream; in the same way, as an instrument of the sublime, smoke has always made obscure what otherwise would have seemed too clear. (Vidler 1992: 41)
But here Lynch’s use of smoke openly makes it into a cliché which, because of its familiarity and the obviousness of its use, becomes less strange and stranger at the same time. The banality of its use, as an obvious trope of the uncanny, singles it out for renewed attention – the déjà vu of the ghostly – the made strange by its too obvious usage. But, like The Innocents, there is a sense here in which the objects that are drawn to our attention act to raise our awareness and terror only as deceptive lures which hide from us, or only later reveal, the true terror. Take, for example, those shots when the spectator looks down the dark corridors of the Madison household for Fred, and when he returns into the light everything appears to be safe and secure and it is later, when safety appears to have been recovered, that the terror re-emerges.
It is also in darkness that Jeffrey Beaumont in Blue Velvet leaves Detective William’s house after delivering the ear he had found, and as he walks down the path from the front door he hears a voice say ‘Are you the one that found the ear?’ The camera then peers, from Jeffrey’s point of view, into the darkness from the direction of the voice as swelling music builds up as the chaste and pure figure of Sandy emerges into the light. Laura Mulvey has written of this entrance thus:
In Freud’s definition the uncanny is simultaneously located in homeliness and is the eruption of something that should remain hidden. Blue Velvet uses the cinema’s own rhetoric to portray the uncanny as, for instance, when Sandy first appears on the screen in a long fade up from black and accompanied by a swelling score. (Mulvey 1996: 153)
Prior to this meeting the scene had opened with a shot up the darkened stairs of the Beaumont house as an upstairs door opens to reveal the silhouetted figure of Jeffrey, whose descent into what Mulvey refers to as the netherworld, begins at this point. As Jeffrey leaves the house the TV screen depicts a man’s legs going upstairs in a film noir. It is this knowingness, this playing with film form and genre, combined with the ability to utilize the inherent strangeness of film, which creates the uncanny throughout these works. As Jeffrey leaves the Williams’ house he says ‘Say hello to Sandy from me’. Yet, when he meets Sandy it is apparent that they do not really know each other, but that growing up in the same small town they have attended the same school. What appears to be familiar is (knowingly) made strange. Again, Mulvey puts her finger on it when she writes:
However, the surface world is depicted as ‘surface’. It has the immaterial, itself uncanny, quality of a cliché which speaks of appearance and nothing else and the impermanent, almost comic, quality of a postcard which has no substance other than connotation. On the other hand, unlike the flatness and colour saturation of the opening images, the darkness draws in the camera with the force of fascinated curiosity. (Mulvey 1996: 151)
Later on when Jeffrey is confronted by Mike, Sandy’s ex-boyfriend, the naked, battered and bruised figure of Dorothy is shown staggering onto the front lawn of Jeffrey’s house as Mike taunts him by saying ‘Is that your mother?’ Sandy moves from darkness into light, whereas Dorothy’s battered body is dark and bruised in contrast to the whiteness of her unaffected skin.5
Similarly, in Eraserhead, the darkness and solitude, though not silence as the omnipresent industrial sounds permeate the film and thereby provide a sonic sense of the uncanny, are present and (in)correct when Henry is enticed into a sexual encounter with the ‘Beautiful Girl across the Hall’. Henry, sitting alone in his room, hears two knocks at the door. When he opens the door we are presented with shots from his perspective into the deep, black darkness from which, after what appears to be some considerable time, the woman emerges. She says ‘I locked myself out of my apartment...And it’s soo late’. She then walks into the room as Henry retreats in fear of this dark seductress, but at the same time he tries to quiet the sounds of the mutant ‘baby’. Then they make love in a deep pool of what appears to be a milky substance and submerge under the liquid on the surface of which lies her hair, floating strangely, separated from the rest of her body. She is then shown emerging from darkness to witness the planet, which leads into the ‘Lady in the Radiator’ singing ‘In heaven’. The Lady’s appearance and song are strangely amusing and reassuring rather than terrifying. Her face, with its protuberances, seems more comic than disquieting, even as she squelches umbilical cords under her shoes as Fats Waller’s organ sounds accompany her jerky lateral movements across the stage.
So far in looking at specific scenes I have concentrated on the visual effects, but these cannot, in Lynch’s work, be divorced from the extraordinary and visceral sense of sound. Sound can act as an uncanny precursor to trauma, reactivating the sense of dread and fear. Nicholas Royle points out that:
Hoffmann’s story suggests uncanniness in the experience of sound, ear and voice. Freud makes no mention of this dimension of ‘The Sandman’. Again, it is a question of something neither quite simply thematic nor formal, but rather an eerie, performative twisting. There is a repeated emphasis on the frightening sound of the sandman (Royle 2003: 46, emphasis added).
Sound ‘works’ throughout Lynch’s films providing a continual ‘performative twisting’ with which to produce an eerie effect and affect for the spectator. In a very real sense, unlike most films where soundtracks are added to the images later, Lynch’s films incorporate sounds throughout and within the images, and are not separated out for post-production. This provides a strong sense of how sounds can bypass rational, cognitive ‘understanding’ of the narrative. Sounds travel and affect indirectly, working on the body and psyche in ways which disrupt the narrative flow.6
Seeing something too close is one of the aspects of anxiety that Lacan talks about in his seminar on Anxiety (Angoisse) – it arises because one is too close to the object of desire. The well-known opening of Blue Velvet makes this point especially well. As Jeffrey’s father lies on the ground the camera takes us under the neatly mown lawn to see the bugs lurking beneath, with exaggerated sounds of their squelching bodies in all their pure life-enjoyment.7 Similarly, the opening shots of the blue velvet curtain as that film’s credits appear texturally strange and take on the appearance more of wood or some dense material, not the soft sensuousness of velvet.
The interior of the Lynchian home, indeed any home made uncanny, is also replete with domestic items which can take on a new significance. These can become objects of dread rather than comfort and security. In the Palmer household the ceiling fan at the top of the stairs hums dreadfully as an index of impending incest whenever Leland drugs his wife and rapes his daughter. The fan is presented throughout the series in close-up and its presence suggests problems in the household without making clear what the problems are. At the beginning of the pilot episode, as Sarah Palmer runs upstairs to discover that her daughter is not in the house, we are given a close-up shot of the fan, which appears odd in the way it is singled out for attention. This shot is repeated throughout the series. It is strange in that it is singled out for attention but the reasons for doing so do not become obvious until later on when the viewer comes to understand its significance when Leland is shown switching it on after drugging his wife. The sound of the fan, which should provide relief from the nighttime heat, comes to act indexically for Laura and the viewer as a sign of her impending abuse.
Similarly, in Twin Peaks the Palmer household is simultaneously safe and familiar as well as strange and unsettling. Episode 2 starts with a long shot of the house at night. The large, detached, white clapboarded building, well lit up from within, provides an image of secure domestic bliss. However, the shot offers a slightly disturbing presence – too many lights are switched on within, as if in mortal fear of the dark. There is then an image of a stag’s head and part of its body, one of the pictures of the natural picturesque inside the house, but, by giving us a close-up, the image takes on a less secure role. As the spectator is presented with this image we hear the sounds of someone (Leland Palmer) breathing heavily and in obvious distress, accompanied by the sounds of his fingers clicking. Following this is a medium shot of Leland standing by the old-fashioned record player in the living room. We see him clicking his fingers and then placing the stylus onto the record. His breathing becomes more measured and controlled as the music, ‘Pennsylvania 6-5000’, starts to play. There is then an extreme close-up of the record with the stylus gyrating over the shellac grooves of the LP (in a similar manner to how a record player is shown in INLAND EMPIRE, see Figures 20 and 21). And this shot, like the earlier one of the stag, makes the space strange: the shot is too close to the musical object and points out its strangeness as the disembodied joyous big-band sound blares out into the room to accompany strangely his obvious distress, acting contrapuntally to the images presented. This extreme close-up of the outmoded record player acts as a reminder of the proximity of danger within the house, even though the viewers do not know, at this stage, that Leland Palmer is Laura’s murderer. Even on subsequent viewings, and with this knowledge now in place, I would argue that this and other shots within this scene are still uncanny because of their repetitive strangeness. For, as Sarah Kofman (1991: 137) points out ‘There can be no instance of the uncanny that does not always already imply repetition’. And, I would argue, this repetition may be the spectator’s repeated viewing of the text rather than textual knowledge from within, which, even with greater narrative knowledge, does not entirely dispel the feelings experienced, albeit in a slightly different way in subsequent engagement with the same text, which is itself strange – to view the same film again but to see it and experience it slightly differently. The repetition is, therefore, structurally inherent in the film text, in the way the shots and sounds repeat the uncanny strangeness of overproximity. In this case, for example, the extreme close-up of the record player, as with the bugs in Blue Velvet, reactivates the initial feelings of strangeness within the ordinary.
As Barbara Engh (1999: 60) has pointed out, ‘To its first auditors, the phonograph was, in a word, uncanny’ and, in these shots (Figures 20 and 21), it becomes so again. As technology becomes outmoded, its strangeness can, in a sense, be experienced anew. No longer taken for granted, its oddness becomes flickeringly palpable particularly when seen in close-up detail. The joyous sounds emanating from the speakers in the Palmer household appear at odds with the technical device for playing out these strange sounds, which as Engh (1999: 60) also points out, ‘The troubling convergence of magic and positivism was realized, in a sense, in the phonograph’.
Figures 20 and 21: The record player in the Palmer household in Twin Peaks, and the superimposition of the ‘lost girl’ onto the grooves in INLAND EMPIRE (2006).
As the music plays Leland walks towards the centre of the living room and stops to try and gather his obviously troubled thoughts. He then looks down to his left as the camera tilts to follow his movement as he picks up the framed photograph of Laura Palmer as Prom Queen. He then starts to dance with the photograph in his outstretched arms in an anti-clockwise circular motion, moaning and screaming as he does so. His wife, Sarah Palmer, then enters the room from the right and tries to stop him dancing, but she is unable to do so, as he says ‘we must dance’. And, in so doing he breaks the glass of the photograph frame and Sarah’s hand is cut. Sarah then rushes to the record player and throwing out her arm in a manner which appears be almost mechanical, knocks the stylus away from the record, which screeches as an index of her distress as it ‘plays’ violently against the grain of the record’s grooves, as a discordant reminder of the disjunction between the music and Leland’s desperate dance. She then screams a sentence she had said slightly earlier to Leland as she tried to stop him dancing, and now repeats – ‘What is going on in this house?’ as Leland sinks to his knees over the broken photograph frame and, in tears, wipes the blood over the photographed face of his dead daughter. The blood on the surface of the photograph acts as a signifier of Laura’s murder, of her blood which was spilled by his hands. As a rack focus brings Leland into clarity the theme tune starts to play and the screen fades to black, before going onto Cooper’s dream (see Chapter 1).
In this short scene the viewer is presented with close-up images of the technologies of the phonograph, the photograph and film, which, by deferred action and the spectator’s subsequent knowledge, ‘proves’ to us later that the strange and uncanny feelings felt now had some basis in ‘fact’. Laura’s iconic image as Prom Queen, her public role as all round ‘good girl’, stands at odds with the image of the dead, fetishized Laura, to which I have referred in Chapter 1. Both photographs haunt the series, as a double of each other. Laura is present even in death; in fact, even more so in death. Her absence fills the screen as an immanent presence to rival Cooper’s (again see Chapter 1 for a more detailed discussion on this point). In fact it is her death which makes her absence present, as well as the appearance of her cousin and double, Maddy Ferguson, who is played by the same actor (Sheryl Lee), whose own murder retroactively prefigures that of Laura, taking into account the temporal disjunctions offered by the series and subsequent ‘prequel’ film.
If we now move forwards to the end of Episode 14 when Maddy Ferguson is murdered, we have a repetition of this earlier scene. Again the opening shot is a close-up of the record player. Immediately before this Agent Cooper was shown in the Roadhouse listening to Julee Cruise, when the Giant appears and says, as I’ve entitled this chapter ‘It is happening again’. To refer back to Kofman’s words about there being no instances of the uncanny without repetition, the scene then dissolves to the Palmer household. The next shot from over the shoulder of Leland shows him looking into the mirror, where, at this point, his own face as you would expect is reflected back to him. There is then a cut to the earlier shot where it is BOB’s face reflected in the mirror back at Leland. As BOB ‘takes’ over Leland we are then presented with a cut to a shot of the view from the living room into the brightly lit hallway. As Leland/BOB puts on white surgical gloves Maddy’s voice is heard, off-screen, from upstairs saying ‘Aunt Sarah. Uncle Leland. What’s that smell?’ She then comes into the living room and sees Leland/BOB. Chased by him as she seeks to run away up the stairs, she is dragged into the living room and violently punched. He then, in a repetition of the dance earlier with Laura’s photograph, lifts her off the floor and into his arms as he affects an obscene parody of a romantic close dance. During this scene the action alternates between the shots in colour of Leland with Maddy to the bright, white light, shot in slow motion when BOB takes over. When the shots revert to Leland he calls her ‘Laura’ and ‘my baby’ before being depicted thumping her viciously and repeatedly in the face and eventually taking hold of her head and shouting ‘You’re going back to Missoula, Montana’, as he then rams her head violently into a photograph on the wall, and as she lies dead on the floor he inserts a letter (‘T’) under her fingernail, as had been done in the other murders.
Doubles abound in these sequences: Leland and BOB as his evil double, Maddy as Laura’s cousin and these two scenes doubling in the sense of their depiction of the same yet different representations of trauma. Film ontologically provides a medium which is rich in its possibilities for exploring the figure of the double, and Lynch’s films take up these possibilities, from Eraserhead up to INLAND EMPIRE.
Otto Rank’s The Double: A Psychoanalytic Study, originally published in 1914, before his break with orthodox Freudian views after 1924, was itself based around cinema and Hanns Heinz Ewers’ The Student of Prague. For Rank, the theme of the double comes from an ancient folk-tradition, the content of which is eminently psychological and is altered by the demands of cinematic means of representation. But, Rank points out that ‘It may perhaps turn out that cinematography, which in numerous ways reminds us of the dream-work, can also express certain psychological facts and relationships...in such clear and conspicuous imagery that it facilitates our understanding of them’ (Rank 1971: 4). For cinematography and editing allow for changes in size and scale, together with different temporalities and spatial configurations to be explored in ways which are similar to the condensations and displacements of dreamwork. Rank, like Freud, refers to Hoffmann as the classical creator of the uncanny, particularly the ‘double-projection’, and that Hanns Heinz Ewers was known as ‘the modern E.T.A. Hoffman’ (Rank 1971: 8–9). Rank states that:
In a particularly clear defensive form, The Student of Prague shows how the feared self obstructs the love for a woman; and in Wilde’s novel (The Picture of Dorian Gray) it becomes clear that fear and hate with respect to the double-self are closely related with the narcissistic love for it with the resistance of this love. (Rank 1971: 73)
He goes on to argue that:
The most prominent symptom of these forms which the double takes is a powerful consciousness of guilt which forces the hero no longer to accept the responsibility for certain actions of his ego, but to place it upon another ego, a double, who is either personified by the devil himself or is created by making a diabolical pact. (Rank 1971: 76)
Furthermore, ‘The frequent slaying of the double, through which the hero seeks to protect himself permanently from the pursuits of his self, is really a suicidal act’ (Rank 1971: 79).
In the depiction of the murder of Maddy Ferguson, already a re-enactment of Leland Palmer’s dance scene with Laura’s photograph, we have a doubling of doubles: for Maddy acts as Laura’s double and BOB is Leland’s. Prior to the actual murder when Leland confronts his mirror-image evil double, BOB, we have, as Mladen Dolar (1991: 13) points out, the specular image of the non-specular – the Lacanian objet a: ‘We can now see the trouble with the double: the double is that mirror image in which the object a is included. So the imaginary starts to coincide with the real, provoking a shattering unity’. As Dolar (1991: 14) goes on to write:
The double is always the figure of jouissance: on the one hand he is someone who enjoys at the subject’s expense; he commits acts one wouldn’t dare to commit, he indulges in one’s repressed desires and makes sure that the blame falls on the subject. On the other hand, though, he is not simply someone who enjoys, but essentially a figure that commands jouissance.
And, as I’ve previously mentioned, that is why the final shots of the final episode of Twin Peaks are, to me at least, so disturbing, as Cooper’s double appears to be infiltrated by BOB: even our most familiar image of safety is no longer safe.
Freud concludes his essay ‘The “Uncanny”’ in the following manner:
Concerning the factors of silence, solitude and darkness, we can only say that they are actually elements in the production of the infantile anxiety from which the majority of human beings have never become quite free. This problem has been discussed from a psychoanalytic point of view elsewhere.1 (Freud 1990: 376. The footnote says [See the discussion of children’s fear of the dark in Freud’s Three Essays (1905d), P.F.L., 7, 147 n.1.])
What a strange way to finish! The reader is brought to an abrupt, brusque conclusion and left where? High and dry or somewhere strange and unsettling in itself, as if we have been dismissed, or that the subject is not worthy of further discussion. We then have to consult another essay published fourteen years earlier to try and make sense of this unsettling conclusion. The implication given to the reader is that this problem will be solved or sorted at this other place. Let us take a look at the footnote, to bring it into the main body of the text, to see if this clears matters up:
For this explanation of the origin of infantile anxiety I have to thank a three-year-old boy whom I once heard calling out of a dark room: ‘Auntie, speak to me! I’m frightened because it’s so dark.’ His aunt answered him: ‘What good would that do? You can’t see me.’ ‘That doesn’t matter,’ replied the child, ‘if anyone speaks, it gets light.’ Thus what he was afraid of was not the dark, but the absence of someone he loved; and he could feel sure of being soothed as soon as he had evidence of that person’s presence. [Added 1920:] One of the most important results of psychoanalytic research is this discovery that neurotic anxiety arises out of libido, that it is the product of a transformation of it, and that it is thus related to it in the same kind of way as vinegar is to wine. A further discussion of this problem will be found in my Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1916–17), [Lecture 25], though even there, it must be confessed, the question is not finally cleared up. [For Freud’s latest views on the subject of anxiety see his Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1936d) and his New Introductory Lectures (1933a), Lecture 32.] (Freud 1991a: 147)
So, that’s clear then! It appears as if Freud has got himself into a dark corner where there is not an aunt or other woman who can speak, soothe him and therefore make the darkness light. He is seemingly lost in the dark continent of feminine sexuality where the only response is to keep deferring and deflecting his problem elsewhere. And to add to that the additional material of 1920 further complicates this problem, as does the reference to another lecture – on and on we go in a search which has to be repeated but not resolved.
‘The “Uncanny”’ essay brings, flickeringly into light, many issues: the death drive; silence, solitude and darkness – which all appear to revolve around the complexities, for Freud, of the feminine and feminine sexuality.
In all of the many examples of uncanny literature and film, the dissolution of exterior/interior suggests a terror that socially might be kept under control, but which psychically continues to make itself felt. Historically, this terror can be related to changing social conditions within post-Enlightenment attempts to control irrationality by recourse to rational explanations. But, specifically what can be said of the changing conditions in the production and reception of these differing uncanny works?
Mladen Dolar (1991: 7, emphasis in the original) argues that ‘There is a specific dimension of the uncanny that emerges with modernity...and that haunts it from inside’ and that in pre-modern societies ‘the dimension of the uncanny was covered (and veiled) by the area of the sacred and untouchable’. Historically, the modern uncanny came into being during the Enlightenment and the French Revolution where ‘There was an irruption of the uncanny strictly parallel with bourgeois (and industrial) revolutions and the rise of scientific rationality – and, one might add, with the Kantian establishment of transcendental subjectivity, of which the uncanny presents the surprising counterpart’.
In Lynch’s films we are presented with this uncanny supplement, which alongside the spirit of scientific rationality, haunts that ‘spirit’ from within. Dolar goes on to argue that:
Just as Lacan has argued that the subject of psychoanalysis is the subject of modernity based on the Cartesian cogito and unthinkable without the Kantian turn, so one has to extend the argument to the realm of the object, the object a. It, too, is most intimately linked with and produced by the rise of modernity. What seems to be a leftover is actually a product of modernity, its counterpart. (Dolar 1991: 7)
What then of postmodernity? He writes that:
what is currently called postmodernism...is a new consciousness about the uncanny as a fundamental dimension of modernity. It doesn’t imply a going beyond the modern, but rather an awareness of its internal limit, its split, which was there from the outset. Lacan’s object a may be seen as its simplest and most radical expression. (Dolar 1991: 23)
He also points out how popular culture, starting with gothic fiction, was the first art form to pick up on these changes and express them, be it in written form, or, in Lynch’s case, in film. And, as Laura Mulvey argues, the importance of Blue Velvet is its incorporation of the gothic into small-town America. Lynch’s films provide many examples of this uncanny supplement of modernity, the inherent transgression within (post-)Enlightenment rationality.
The problematic element of identifying the uncanny is as much to do with the way it returns, unbidden and when least expected, and with the problems of trying to ‘fix’ it in writing, as it constantly eludes rational attempts to contain it. Freud had to put himself into a receptive frame of mind when writing his essay, as if he had no ‘knowledge’ of the subject – when, indeed, he keeps reminding us of instances when he had felt uncanny strangeness – the number 62 for example which kept cropping up and reminded him of his then current age, and his repeated returns to areas of which he had no doubt. Indeed, that whole essay can be read as the supplement constantly eluding him as he sought to fix it under the lens of scientific rationality. As Sarah Kofman has argued, in seeking to fasten the signified of the uncanny in relation to repression, Freud fixes the meaning upon castration anxiety. In doing so ‘Freud, by making a thematic reading of the text, by extracting from it an ultimate signified, the castration complex, responsible for the effect produced, seems trapped within the “traditional logic of the sign”’ (Kofman 1991: 159). But, at the same time, Freud actively seeks to confront the enigma of the uncanny, of the negative aspect of aesthetics which professional aestheticians had, in his view, neglected by focusing only on the positive aspects of beauty. He argues that it is in psychoanalysis’ realm to explore these avenues which means that he is constantly coming up against this supplement which outstrips any rationalist, empiricist attempts to locate it and fix it, and thence to tame it. And he feels strangely compelled (repetition compulsion) to keep coming back to it, to try and understand its workings.
As Neil Hertz has pointed out:
The feeling of the uncanny would seem to be generated by being-reminded-of-the-repetition-compulsion, not by being-reminded-of-whatever-it-is-that-is-repeated. It is the becoming aware of the process that is eerie, not the becoming aware of some particular item in the unconscious, once familiar, then repressed, now coming back into consciousness. (Hertz 1980: 301)
It is the process of being reminded-of-the-repetition-compulsion which creates the sense of the uncanny. Watching a film in the darkness of the auditorium, due to the size of the screen and the sounds emanating around the images, enables the strangeness of the familiar to emerge: to bring forward the ‘being-reminded-of-the-repetition-compulsion’, which can vanish as soon as one leaves the cinema, but which can return unbidden when least expected. And it is this very nature of the process by which it appears – the domesticated sublime, the unhomely in the midst of the homely, that makes it so uncanny. The boundaries between the heimlich and the unheimlich, which, for the most part, appear solid and safe, can become, very quickly, permeable, unsettling any rational sense of safety and security.
Lynch’s films abound with the uncanny throughout, from where its effects/affects are themselves felt or experienced by the spectator. So rather than looking for themes in works we should perhaps acknowledge that the uncanny is more than this, that it is a supplement which makes its presence felt when least expected, or unbidden, and that film is ontologically able to provide this ghostly presence which disrupts and disturbs attempts to constrain it. And Lynch’s films acknowledge these fundamental realizations about the unheimlich, and thus offer distinct textual effects/affects which do not seek to separate out the uncanny as a theme in the work, but explore its strangeness from within, thereby creating a Möbius-like relationship between the filmic text and the spectatorial reading-effect which are intertwined and provide for distinct, eerie forms of ‘performative twisting’.
1. Other contributing directors to the Lumière & Company centenary collection of films included Spike Lee, Wim Wenders, Zhang Yimou, Liv Ullmann, Gosta Gravas and John Boorman.
2. Here, again, I am thinking of the work of Sean Cubitt (2004), Lev Manovich (2001), Laura Mulvey (2004) and Slavoj 
i
ek (2000), among others.
3. This line, spoken by Mrs Grose in the film, was written by John Mortimer.
4. Jack Clayton experimented with multiple dissolves in this film which he said produced ‘images which hang there...and have a meaning which applies both to the end of the last scene and the beginning of the next’. Clayton and his editor, Jim Clark, worked on a technical effect whereby the dissolves used burned out into white rather than faded to the usual black (for further details see Sinyard 2000: 82, and 107, note 3).
5. See Chapter Five, ‘Black and Blue’, in Brunette and Willis (1989: 139–117) for a deconstructive analysis of Blue Velvet.
6. Slavoj iek (2000: 44, and 47, note 47) mentions how a rumour emerged that some viewers of Eraserhead experienced nausea due they believed to an ultra-low, inaudible frequency in the film’s soundtrack that affected the viewer’s subconscious mind. This leads iek to conclude that: ‘The status of this voice that no one can perceive, but which nonetheless dominates us and produces material effects (feelings of unease and nausea), is real-impossible: it is the voice which the subject cannot hear because it is uttered in the Other Site of the fundamental fantasy – and is not Lynch’s entire work an endeavor [sic] to bring the spectator “to the point of hearing inaudible noises” and thus to confront the comic horror of the fundamental fantasy?’
7. See iek (1995) for a discussion of ‘The Lamella of David Lynch’, and in particular, p. 206 for his comments on the opening shots of Blue Velvet. See also, Brunette and Wills (1989) for the deconstructive discussion as to how the bugs in this film disrupt a psychoanalytic reading.
