Conclusion: Stitching up Lynch

Pulling threads

So here we are, coming to the end of this labour of love. It seems strange having lived with these films for so long in partial silence and then desiring to write about them, seeking to focus my thoughts and research, then actually putting pen, paper, keyboard and mouse together to try and make sense of my previously largely unsaid thoughts. It feels almost as if I’ve betrayed a secret, but I do not know to whom I had pledged to keep my thoughts to myself, nor why. And what I write about these films seems so different from what I thought I would end up saying, even from the initial plans I had, but which dramatically and unexpectedly changed as I started and then subsequently reworked each chapter. The silence and relative aphasia which Schefer (1995) writes about, in respect of what he considers to be the proper illusion of cinema, is something that appears to have been hijacked by my writing double. This sense of estrangement, or my strangeness to myself as Kristeva (1991) discusses, makes me feel as if it has been an automaton double who has melded these words together by taking my initial plans and altering them to its design. Yet, this double, my own uncanny strangeness to myself, is itself part of what helps me to love the images and sounds of these films. Again, as Schefer (1995: xix) puts it, ‘I’m just talking about myself. I’ve never known how to do otherwise; and yet, when I speak of myself (or speak in my own name), I’m still only speaking about what it is that I’m looking for, rather than what I am’. And what is it that I’m looking for in these films? Can it be found or is it always beyond one’s grasp?

As I come to conclude I wonder what else I can say. Is it here that my thoughts will finally coalesce? Or is it at this point that I, exhausted from this massive, Sisyphean task, collapse at the bottom of the hill before seeking to push the textual boulder to the top again? Is it even possible to (want to) conclude anyway? Can one say all that one wants to say? What happens then? Like a film that has just finished is one left with a sense of jubilation or depletion or the immediate desire to see it or another one? Again, as Schefer (1995: xx) goes on to say apropos of his own work on film, ‘Yet the idea of a plan (a synthesis, a system) is what’s most clearly lacking at the fulcrum of these texts...Within the text there’s a labile, fleeting, polymorphous object’. And what I’m seeking to do is to consider how the subject and object come together via the sensations produced by cinema, and, in particular, this body of work organized under the signature of ‘Lynch’. And I want to keep open the polysemy of the texts alive, to allow them to ‘think’ and move in ways which do not inhabit a free-flowing discursiveness, and to allow my thoughts to flow across and within the films and other cultural products. By so doing I hope that they will retain or attain some degree of ‘a labile, fleeting, polymorphous’ objectivity, which perhaps tells me something about myself, and my illusionary solitude in relation to this body of work and how this might relate to a wider social field. Then perhaps we may come to some degree of understanding about how these texts interact with cinematic history and Hollywood, and our own histories; which might then meld together the cinema objects with the spectator in ways which permit mutual imbrications and newly configured understandings between them.

I love these films, my love has been tested and it has not been found wanting, by me at least. They continue to hold a fascination for/over me which has not dissipated during the process of researching and writing. Instead their attraction for me, or rather their hold over me, continues unabated. Except of course for Dune,1 for you, whomever it is that reads these words, may have detected that there is no mention of that film anywhere. I could not bring myself to write about it – it drives me mad. And even though I’ve watched it many times (purely out of academic rigour) and read all the critical texts in relation to it, I could not bring myself to discuss it here; it would somehow interfere with and diminish the pleasure of the other films.

Tying up ends

Apart from this admission or confession, the remainder of the Lynch corpus retains a strong hold over me. In an effort to bring the various chapters of this book together into some form of concluding remarks, by which the interweaving of the various parts may come into focus, I want to go over the individual chapters, to pull out some key points, to see if and how they might be stitched together.

In thinking about Lynch as an artist I keep being drawn to an analogy between the late twentieth/early twenty-first-century and seventeenth-century baroque art and artists. For, as Christine Buci-Glucksmann (1994: 23) writes, ‘the baroque culture of the seventeenth century has been regarded as a culture industry which produced an artificial public arena by combining elements of high and low culture’. And, likewise here, with Lynch’s relationship to Hollywood, mediated through high and low, we have a similar interaction within this culture industry.

In addition to connecting these films to the culture of the baroque, it might also be useful to take on board Slavoj iek’s (1995) readings of Lynch as a postmodern ‘pre-raphaelite’ whose work overlaps the avant-garde with kitsch in a similar fashion. And there is a sense in which Lynch’s position within Hollywood film production and fine art practice does indeed link together divergent forms of high and popular culture, and allows us to extend our thinking about these films beyond the narrow confines of postmodern critical discourse in which his output has often been contained and constrained. The sense of ‘baroque reason’ in these films can, thereby, provide a wider historical understanding of the various culture industries of the seventeenth century and now, which might allow us to consider how Lynch’s films fit into a historical understanding of the technologies of representation. I would like to suggest that one of the central components of this study and which links it together is its evocation of the irrational and excessive in Lynch’s output which, I suggest, requires placement in a wider historical framework than has previously been used in relation to these films.

I am also drawn to an analogy with Jan Vermeer’s painting The Lacemaker (1669–1670) to which Parveen Adams (2003: 173) refers in relation to her analysis of the photographs of Joel-Peter Witkin, where those skeins or threads of real paint that disrupt the entire surface of the painting ‘shows us something of the intrication of the real, imaginary, and symbolic in representation’. In a similar fashion Lynch’s films also provide examples of the interlocking of the three Lacanian registers in a manner that suggests that the genealogy or aetiology of these cinematic symptoms coexist with much more than purely contemporary concerns. So, the interweaving of high and low cultural concerns in the individual texts necessitates reflecting upon the wider ramifications of their form and meaning over a long historical period. In addition to this, it may also be remembered that it is a reproduction of Vermeer’s painting that is visible when the woman in Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali’s 1929 surrealist film, Un Chien Andalou, throws the book she is leafing through onto the floor.

Thus, a path weaves its way, refiguring the possibilities of textual tracery between a wide range of materials to arrive, like a postmodern version of Ariadne’s web, at the cinematic complexities of Lynch’s overdetermined output. Here, from the initial palimpsest where we began, a filmy recovering of new, critical textual traces and filaments may emerge. But, rather than these comments covering the films, we can, perhaps, think of them as separate traces, or even textual ‘sprockets’ running alongside the films, to be read or not, as a form of viewing screenplay ‘notes’ to supplement the manifest content of the films themselves.

Unravelling

As mentioned in the introductory chapter, the Lynchian archive currently consists of somewhat polarized responses to these film texts. For many commentators Lynch is considered to be an auteur, one who’s ‘subconscious’ provides the meaning for the films. Often in line with these approaches is a simultaneous condemnation of the works for being reactionary, displaying racist and sexist tendencies behind their postmodern aesthetic veneer. Against these views are critics, usually of a psychoanalytic persuasion or other tranches of continental thought, who provide more involved, detailed readings of the films and contemporary filmmaking generally to elucidate the complexities and paradoxes present in the works. The introductory chapter also brought into focus the widely differing positions between theory and post-theory which has, in one form or another, continued to play off against each other throughout the individual chapters.

In Chapter 1 I sought to provide a detailed reading of the closing sequence of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me as a synecdoche for the whole of Twin Peaks, as well as picking up on key Lynchian themes across his films. Using Walter Benjamin’s work I suggested that this extract brought together many important aspects of Lynch’s output – melancholia and tragedy, (black) comedy, jouissance, cinematic technology (especially slow motion), together with the spectator’s ability to use home cinematic technology to fixate upon key shots, scenes and sequences – in a conjoined aesthetics of femininity and death, and a form of aesthetic failure, but where failure is paradoxically a type of success. In addition, this chapter introduced the historical reading of this film alongside Benjamin’s work on baroque tragedy, by which we could start to consider Lynch’s work within a longer historical perspective than has generally been adopted in critical reactions to the films. Thus, starting from a strong personal attachment to one, short piece of film, we were able to extend our discussion to cover a wide range of issues.

In Chapter 2 I wanted to develop part of the preceding discussion via a reading of one form of excess in Lynch’s work: tears. Using Joan Copjec’s Lacanian reading of melodrama and crying allows us to read the chosen scenes as providing for a form of empathetic response in respect of the alienated nature of post-Enlightenment subjectivity. The extracts analysed signify how Lynch’s use of tears can be read as much more than simply regressive sentimentality. In addition, Copjec’s analyses allow us to consider the implications of tears in cross or multi-generic texts which combine, inter alia, melodrama and noir to ascertain how tears function both in a historic setting and also in contemporary cultural discourse.

In Chapter 3, Los Angeles, Hollywood cinema and the road came together in a ride down various lost highways. By reading a number of films from European art house cinema, to noir and films from the 1960s and 1970s, the use of vehicles in Lynch’s work attested to the overdetermined relationship between various forms of cinematic and vehicular technologies. As such, I sought to consider Lynch’s use of vehicles away from the many, existing commentaries on the genre of road movies, to reflect upon the changing ways in which cars and the road have conjoined many different ideas, and the ways in which both have been mutually involved in the exploration of time and movement. Thus, I suggest, Lynch’s films keep us on the road of representation, but one in which the Real erupts and challenges the hegemony of much, mainstream cinema.

Chapter 4 explored the interrelationship between trauma and cinema to consider their mutual concerns. Starting with a reading of Hiroshima mon amour and ending with Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive and Christopher Nolan’s Memento, we came to an understanding that the experimentation of the modernist avant-garde was now incorporated within the mainstream (or edges of it anyhow), but that the traumas offered by contemporary cinema are somewhat different from those of the European art cinema of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Now the spectator’s relationship to trauma is so widespread that trauma and tragedy surround us all and are paradoxically unrecognizable. This is why I read Lynch’s films alongside a range of other films. This gave us the opportunity to consider how different forms of cinematic representations gave voice to aspects of trauma which necessitate various forms of interpretative work from spectators, and which have changed significantly over time. So that, for instance, the use of the flashback as a cinematic trope is used, albeit differently, in Hiroshima mon amour and Detour; and is replaced by a dissimilar form of traumatic representation in the contemporary examples chosen of Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive and Memento. Here, the spectator’s relationship to trauma and the protagonist’s ‘knowledge’ and understanding of it is analogous via the form and content of that representation. As such, the narrative framework cannot be resolved as in classical narratives, nor can we enter into a kind of forgetting without the consequent or necessary reintegration of remembering which Cowie suggests is available to the spectator in Hiroshima mon amour, and thus provides for some form of resolution. Now, what these contemporary examples tell us about current notions of cinematic exhibition and spectatorship, which is different from the earlier examples, is something I want to ponder. Because we do not appear to have access to any such resolution, the narratives leave us unsettled, dislocated and out of place. Now what can that mean? Or, rather, what is the impact of this for the contemporary spectator?

Chapter 5 took the ontologically uncanny nature of film and Lynch’s exploitation of the potential of the medium to make strange its familiarity and to make familiar its strangeness, to suggest that cinema and psychoanalysis are inextricably intertwined. However, this is not to suggest that there is some direct connection between them which would allow for banal comparisons to be made. However, their interlocking or parallel histories allow us to think about their specificities in relation to modern and postmodern subjectivity and spectatorship. Thus, these discourses or modes of address grant us the opportunity to think about the ways in which film can work on the spectator, or rather how the uncanny is a reading effect in which the spectator is caught up in the familiar strangeness of the text, and that the two cannot be separated out in any straightforward sense. This, then, provides a link with the previous chapter, to suggest that contemporary spectatorship, while it does contain the seeds of its avant-garde predecessors, offers a somewhat different experience in which film text and spectatorship are intertwined in a reconfigured manner, as a form of Möbius aesthetic. Similarly, this allows us to consider the changing relationship between capitalist production and consumption over the period since the beginnings of cinema and to consider where we are now, and Lynch’s place within these debates.

In Chapter 6 we came full circle in some senses, from Lynch’s initial motivation for working with film – to make moving paintings – to his digital filmmaking in INLAND EMPIRE. Except, at this juncture, I wanted to make the point that digital technology, as Lev Manovich has shown, makes cinema (once again) a subgenre of painting, and that the shift from analogue to digital may be considered analogous to that between fresco and tempera to oil painting in the early Renaissance. This technological change also provides a platform for the redefinition of what can be done with cinema. At the same time, as Jacques Rancière (2006: 4) has pointed out, like other art forms such as painting and literature, cinema’s meaning cuts across the borders between the arts, and with digital technology we can see how these seemingly different art forms become ever more closely interwoven. In addition, this chapter gave me the opportunity, via Jerry Aline Flieger’s work, to consider the theoretical possibilities of digital technology and the internet, to suggest that Lynch’s work chimes with the possibilities of rapprochements between seemingly incompatible theoretical positions.

Stitch marks

The connections between story, pictures and affective colours, as Jean-Louis Schefer (1995) refers to them, provide in Lynch’s films an overdetermined relationship between high art and popular culture and the complexities and problematics of their interrelationship. For narrative is not the only, or perhaps predominant, framework for these films. The relationship between these films, early ‘primitive’ filmmaking and avant-garde art clearly shows that images and sounds are as important as the narrative trajectory. Indeed the differing elements come up against each other to disrupt the normalization of film in the Hollywood tradition. This is apparent from Lynch’s early films while training in fine art at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia in the late 1960s. This fine art education gives us insights into the association between painting and avant-garde film to which he was exposed in his student days and which continues in the mature work where these concerns are interwoven with explorations (or deconstructions) of narrative and genre patterns.

Rich tapestry

Throughout this book I have sought to weave together cinema and psychoanalysis as two forms of discourse or modes of modernity which came into being at roughly the same time at the end of the nineteenth century, and thereby to consider where cinema is now and Lynch’s place within it in relation to these discursive formations. These considerations of how psychoanalysis and cinema are mutually implicated, or woven together historically, centre on crucial concepts of spectatorship and subjectivity in relation to the filmic text. By considering these points I want to place them within a historical setting, as this seems to me crucial to an understanding of them and their operations, both at the end of the nineteenth century and now.

For instance, Vicky Lebeau (2001: 45) writes, in relation to apparatus theory, that ‘To push the point, the unconscious is the condition of cinema, essential to the act of watching a film’. If that is the case then a post-theory cognitivist approach is not able to provide a detailed enough reading of film texts. I did not intend, at the outset, to be playing off theory against post-theory, but as I kept coming up against the latter in my research and readings I felt that there was a need to confront or deal with their objections to theory (and by this I, as the post-theorists do, am really referring to psychoanalysis, particularly in its Lacanian mode). As I have referred to the work of the post-theorists at various points throughout this dissertation, I want to pick out their main concerns and theoretical approach which calls for rationalist approaches to the study of film without recourse to unconscious explanations. David Bordwell (Bordwell and Carroll 1996) suggests that psychoanalytic approach might be used if a rational explanation fails, but implicit in this is an assumption that this will not be necessary. However, as Cubitt (2004: 4) points out, all films fail the reality test and are somewhat uncanny. As such readings that explore, in detail, the psychological and philosophical aspects of the uncanny seem, to me, to be more satisfactory than ones that skirt over these issues in an attempt to provide straightforward rationalist and cognitivist explanations. And while Elsaesser’s and Buckland’s (2002) adoption of such a cognitivist reading of Lost Highway clearly sets out how that position can be used to provide a reading of such a film, there is something unsatisfactory, to me, about its inability to fully deal with the complexities of the uncanny elements in that film – that this approach is not sufficient to account for the intricacies of the texts. Instead, I have invoked Sarah Kofman’s work, among others, to suggest that psychoanalytic aesthetics can provide the grounds for reading the overdetermined complexities of these texts that go beyond purely middle-ground rationalist approaches.

And I note, as I re-read these chapters, that there is something unsettling about trying to fix the uncanny into a formal chapter, as it exceeds the limits of that framework. References to the word abound in elusive forms throughout all of the chapters, which is, perhaps, as it should be, as in its indeterminancy the uncanny cannot be fixed down into place; it exceeds its boundaries and breaks down the distinction between inside and outside (chapters). I also noted that references to the Möbius-strip keep reappearing, and the notion of topological structures which permeate both Lacan’s later work and Lynch’s narrative frameworks seem to be a most appropriate framework in readings of these films.

Underpinning my approach, or areas of interest, is the shared histories of cinema and psychoanalysis, which I think can provide for readings of both, alone and together, which may tell us about their ‘symbiotic relationship’ as Laura Marcus terms it (quoted in Lebeau 2001: 118) in relation to the shock of the modern experienced in their origins, and their relationship to the present. As Lebeau writes:

In this context, too, the concepts of shock and trauma central to the representation of the modern in both literature and cinema can become a new point of contact with psychoanalysis – its engagement with the vicissitudes of trauma and pleasure in symptom, in dream and in fantasy. (Lebeau 2001: 118)

For the shock of the modern and distracted alienation presented by the new technologies of viewing provided by cinema are inextricably linked to the development of Marx’s commodity fetishism, where as Cubitt (2004: 2–3) puts it,

The historical study of the object of film is then also a study of the evolution of the commodity form...[and that] Film is uniquely situated to reveal the inner workings of the commodity, since it was for most of the last century the most popular, as it is now still the most strategic medium.

And as Cubitt, and Friedberg (1993) among others point out, there was first the proto-cinema of railway travel where citizens were presented with rapidly changing images from their seated viewing positions, to the cinema where stationary onlookers were presented with the illusion of movement which were initially received, as Gunning puts it, as a spectacle of astonishment. But, missing here is an acknowledgement of the importance of sound (first sound to accompany the visuals and then diegetic/non-diegetic sound) as well as images in these new technologies which incorporated the dialectics of magic and positivism, as I have discussed it in Chapter 5 in relation to the ontological uncanniness of film and its consistent realization in Lynch’s films.

Cinema thus provides a specific case study of modernity in which new technologies come together with the development of leisure time, and as Cubitt (2004: 7) remarks, ‘by the late 1920s it would become apparent that the time of consumption was as vital to economic growth as the time of production’. Cinema thus developed its narrative trajectory out of the fairground, literature and theatre which gave us, in due course, particularly as émigré directors fled to America from Nazi Germany, film noir, which as I have tried to show in Chapter 3, came to provide the aesthetic means by which the complexities, contradictions and ambiguities of Hollywood and the cinema business could be allegorically played out in these tales of urban disease. As such, contemporary films such as Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive and INLAND EMPIRE continue to develop these ideas or notions into the postmodern present. Now, if what Mike Davis (1990: 44, and see Chapter 3) says is true, that the contemporary noirs provide for ‘a supersaturation of corruption that fails any longer to outrage or even interest’ then what is going on? What has happened between the initial shock of modernity and current ennui? Because a form of world weariness was apparently there in the birth of modernity, in the flâneur’s languid interaction with Paris in the days of the nineteenth-century arcades. To try and understand the relationship between the then, of the origins of modernity and cinema, with the now of Lynch’s films, requires the assistance of theorists who can straddle these divides. That is why I have invoked Walter Benjamin’s work, particularly in Chapter 1, where I was seeking to read one scene of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me which has haunted and kept me spellbound for years. But Benjamin also allows me to consider this extract within the much wider context of cinema, modernity and postmodernity. By using The Origin of German Tragic Drama we can rethink Lynch’s place within a reading of tragedy from the baroque up to the postmodern.

In the so-called postmodern condition where leisure time is more readily available (for those who can afford it) and where there is a superegoic injunction to enjoy and consume, pastiche and form without content is supposedly the order of the day. For several commentators Lynch’s work personifies such an approach. But, I want to consider the, potentially at least, polymorphous nature of these texts, to keep them open to interpretation rather than seek to close them down. Because I think such readings only take us part of the way towards understanding how and why they work, or fail to work, as they do for the various commentators. Rather than thinking there is a wrong (reactionary) way of looking perhaps we could rephrase the terms towards thinking about what kind of curiosity is mobilized by such works. Writing this brings to mind Sharon Willis’s essay on Wild at Heart where she says ‘Lynch hates women’s bodies; his camera is kindest to the dead female body and most vicious to the maternal one...Lula’s body is treated as sadistically as Marietta’s, but in a more sanitized manner’ (Willis 1997: 149). What I want to do is to draw a different set of conclusions from this and other comments about these works; to seek to understand how they interrelate to a much wider discussion about the role of women in cinema, modernity and postmodernity; and here, Benjamin, Lacan, Kristeva and Bronfen, among others, can help to read how woman was/is positioned as Other in these contexts. And all of these issues can be seen to come together around the uncanny and the Lacanian objet (petit) a.2

Unpicking

As we have seen in Chapter 5, silence, solitude and darkness are three key elements of the uncanny as proposed by Freud, but as we have also seen his discussion of these points falls away abruptly at the end of his essay of 1919. Two of these at least are also key elements of cinema spectatorship – solitude and darkness – at least in the cinema. In addition, silence for me is an integral requirement of cinema viewing; I cannot stand people talking during a film. Yet due to the social nature of the cinematic experience there is, perhaps, always a tacit acknowledgement of other audience members in our seeming solitude in the darkness of the auditorium. Solitude though, even in an imaginary sense, does appear to me to be a necessary component of the viewing experience, as even with someone else, in the darkness the feeling of being a solitary intruder onto the screen of representation allows for a greater degree of involvement with the complexities of identificatory positions available.

Here the changing conceptions of spectatorship seem to me to be of vital interest. I have taken my position on this largely from Joan Copjec’s (1994b) essay ‘The Orthopsychic Subject: Film Theory and the Reception of Lacan’. By repositioning Lacanian film theory away from its emphasis on the mirror stage to his later work on the gaze she argues that:

For beyond everything that is displayed to the subject, the question is asked, ‘What is being concealed from me? What in this graphic space does not show, does not stop not writing itself?’ This point at which something appears to be invisible, this point at which something appears to be missing from representation, some meaning left unrevealed, is the point of the Lacanian gaze. It marks the absence of a signified; it is an unoccupiable point, not, as film theory claims, because it figures an unrealizable ideal but because it indicates an impossible real. (Copjec 1994b: 34–35)

As she goes on to say, ‘The subject is the effect of the impossibility of seeing what is lacking in representation, what the subject, therefore, wants to see’ (Copjec 1994b: 35). So contrary to film theory’s readings of Lacan in the 1970s and 1980s, we are asked to reformulate the spectator’s relations to the image to incorporate the theory of the gaze seemingly being located ‘behind’ the image and not ‘in front of’ it. As such she concludes that in:

Lacan ‘orthopsychism’ – one wishes to retain the term in order to indicate the subject’s fundamental dependence on the faults it finds in representation and in itself – grounds the subject. The desire that it precipitates transfixes the subject, albeit in a conflictual place, so that all the subject’s visions and revisions, all its fantasies, merely circumnavigate the absence that anchors the subject and impedes its progress. (Copjec 1994b: 38)

This approach thereby delves beneath the intractable impasse of the ‘male’ gaze which has sometimes been applied to Lynch’s work in a heavy handed and unsubtle fashion. Because, on an elementary level Lynch is obviously ‘sussed’ enough to know what is being presented in these films. As Laura Mulvey (1996) (often pointed out as the originator of the ‘male’ gaze argument) writes, Blue Velvet is Freud-by-numbers and openly plays with psychoanalytic concepts. But, at the same time, there is a going beyond the obvious, or rather a surface attraction, in these texts that calls out for analysis. Because when the strategies used are so overt then what we need to ask in respect of each of these films is what is actually being presented on the surface of each particular act of parole? What does it mean when someone deliberately seeks to employ specific concepts in filmic form and plays with them in such an overt manner?

As I hope the chapter on the uncanny has pointed out, Lacan’s objet a provides a privileged means of understanding the subject of modernity’s relation to itself and its representations. In Chapter 2 on tears as excess I tried to provide a reading of the thoroughly modern notion of crying which Copjec argues comes about at the end of the eighteenth century, because of the new genre of melodrama which concurrently came in to being with the arrival of the citizen in the public space, who was cut off from ‘his’ innermost being. So, citizenship came about at a cost and this cost marked the crucial lack of recognition between citizens. And now we can perhaps link in Schefer’s comments about the illusion of cinema as one of being a solitary relationship, because here in the cinema auditorium, the spectator in its solitary position looks for the gaze, one of the (lost) objets a, which presents itself behind the image, not in front of it, as one of the lost, impossible objects (together with the voice). And again we can see the post-theorists or cognitivist’s errors in their (mis)readings of Lacan. To be fair, their readings might be taken back to film theory’s use of Lacan’s mirror stage in the 1970s and 1980s, but they certainly appear to be based on readings of secondary rather than primary sources. However in the post-theory work one comes across a large proportion of readings which suggests that Lacan’s work indicates a clear and fixed sense of identification with the image based on the male gaze; whereas, the work I have tried to invoke in my readings of these films is based around the more complex ramifications of using the Lacanian gaze as objet a to read film, and in particular, the films I am concerned with here.

As Buci-Glucksmann (1994: 100–101) points out, Benjamin’s analysis of the petrification of the female body in modernity, in which allegory is united with the commodity ‘partially overlaps with that of Lacan: “The body as final signified is the corpse or the stone phallus”’.3 In Chapter 1, the reading of the final scene from Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me provided a condensed opportunity to think about allegory and images of petrified and dead women which goes way beyond that example, and obliterates any sense of holding on to Lynch as the author and arbiter of the text. As Buci-Glucksmann (1994: 100) goes on to state, Benjamin becomes an actor in his readings of Baudelaire, as I hope to do, in a more modest way, in my readings on Lynch. Or, perhaps it would be more appropriate to refer to Royle’s (2003: 81) remark that writing on film makes one an extra.

Losing the thread

The Lacanian concept of the objet a can therefore provide a means to think about and to link cinema together with spectatorship and the relationship to modernity and postmodernity via the uncanny. The uncanny as Dolar (1991: 5) informs us ‘is located at the very core of psychoanalysis’ and, as I have shown, cinema: the two are mutually intertwined. Dolar (1991: 6) goes on to suggest that: ‘One could simply say that it is the pivotal point around which psychoanalytic concepts revolve, the point that Lacan calls object small a and which he himself considered his most important contribution to psychoanalysis.’

To reiterate the point made in Chapter 5, the object a ‘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). This counterpart or supplement is manifest in technologies such as the photograph, phonograph and cinema where magic meets with positivism. It is at this point that the rise of Enlightenment rationality actually produces its own uncanny supplement, where the ambiguities and paradoxes inherent in the Enlightenment project call forth its own unbidden and unwanted ghosts. It is, as in the phrase iek (2000) uses elsewhere, the ‘inherent transgression’ within rationality. It is the pivotal point, where, in its supposed exclusion of irrationality, the Enlightenment project actually produces it surreptitiously as an unbidden ghostly presence within its home. It is also here that psychoanalysis as a discourse originates, as Copjec makes clear in Chapter 2, to account for these parts of the psyche which are repressed or hidden as the modern subject comes into being. In previous century’s ghosts, hauntings and demons were perceived as external to individuals, now they come to be seen as internal manifestations. And cinema provides a space where the psychical complexities of fantasy can be offered as a form of temporary release from the increasingly constrained mode of life within capitalist production.

The unconscious itself, as an edge or limit, is discovered (or invented) by Freud at that point when the citizen or subject becomes aware of its lack in being, which coincides with the emergence of cinema as a technology for permitting a form of art and aesthetics which allows, nay requires, unconscious identifications. This new form, coincident with the emergence of leisure time, creates a space which, as Schefer (1995: 112) tells us, gives room for ‘this artificial solitude a part of us [which] is porous to the effects of meaning without ever being able to be born into signification through language’. And in this space all the paradoxical aspects of modernity are simultaneously revealed, concealed and congealed via the new uncanny technology.

Converging here are different examples of art forms: magic and circus ‘trickery’, literature and new forms of writing via newspapers and magazines and other ephemeral forms of modernity; in new spaces – firstly shops and then theatres. The latter spaces are themselves uncanny as they sought to make the new medium more respectable, but, at the same time, became simultaneously familiar and yet strange in that the images presented could not be fully tamed within the new exhibition spaces.4 The possibilities for cinema were therefore initially wide and varied and only later did they come to be codified within the constraints of narrative and genre conventions manufactured in Hollywood. But, at the same time, counter-trends from European cinema and avant-garde practice explored, in other ways, the creative potential of the new medium. And Lynch’s films combine these traditions in ways which explore and exploit the form and content of conventions, to problematize them in creative ways, linking together the gothic, melodrama, noir and surrealism with existing narrative and genre codes and conventions of mainstream cinema.

In addition to the foregoing, Dolar (1991: 19) also points out that ‘The uncanny is always at stake in ideology – ideology basically consists of a social attempt to integrate the uncanny’. But rather than try to assign meanings to the uncanny, to fix its signified, ‘psychoanalysis differs from other interpretations by its insistence on the formal level of the uncanny rather than on its content’ (Dolar 1991: 20). He goes on to make the important argument that ‘Psychoanalysis was the first to point out systematically the uncanny dimension pertaining to the very project of modernity, not in order to make it disappear, but in order to maintain it, to hold it open’ (Dolar 1991: 23). And for him the difference between the uncanny in modernity and postmodernity is that in the latter there ‘is a new consciousness about the uncanny as a fundamental dimension of modernity’, and as the accompanying footnote makes plain it is ‘contemporary popular culture that displays the greatest sensitivity to this shift by its insistence on and “working through” the “fundamental fantasies”’ (Dolar 1991: 23).

When we come to look at Lacan’s many formulations of the objet a we cannot fail to see how it is inextricably tied to the notion of woman, indeed how a woman is a symptom of a man, in the sense that a woman can only ever enter the psychic economy of men as a fantasy objet a, the cause of their desire. And so much film has centred itself upon woman as objet a by giving over this space of fantasy and daydreaming to the lost object. By its very nature film is itself ‘lost’ and the (im)possibility of (re)finding the object of desire is manifest in the technology itself, by its elusive lost presence which is based on absence and a lost desire to ‘see’ the truth of its representations. In vain the spectator seeks out the lost object, the cause of desire, and like a good dream, it is searched for time and time again, in the many permutations of desire which the industry and the technology create in an ever increasing spiral of films.

Yet, so many of these films fail, as Cubitt among others notes, to push fantasy far enough, to develop fully the scenarios of desire, in an ideological attempt to restrain the excesses of capitalism. It was not for nothing that Lacan noted that Marx invented the symptom and linked this to surplus enjoyment. But, whereas most mainstream films fail to fully push their fantasy scenarios far enough, Lynch’s films often do. And it is at these points where they are simultaneously commended and condemned. In my readings of the secondary sources I was struck by the contradictory nature of some of the critical responses – of those who spend a great deal of time acknowledging the aesthetic strategies of the films, while simultaneously denouncing the content. This form of disavowal strikes me as important and revealing, and calls out for further comment. For it seems to suggest that there is an unconscious attraction to the work, but, at the same time, there is an intellectual, rational pulling back because of the depicted subject matter, so that the ‘truth’ of the content is regarded as separate and unpalatable.

Picking up the pieces

Writing this book comes at an interesting, exciting, but simultaneously unclear time for theory and theoretical modes of address. The ‘certainties’ of earlier forms of critical engagement with art and film have, over the last few years, come in for questioning, and at times during this process I have found myself somewhat at sea searching for the spotlight of theory to guide me. Over the period of this research I have found myself coming across a variety of theoretical and counter-theoretical approaches, and there was a sense in which I felt that I had to navigate down and across many currents to find a course which permitted a more free-flowing approach in line with the texts under consideration. Not that I was searching for calm, still waters, because there is a great deal of enjoyment and greater intellectual results to be had from more disturbed channels.

In his introduction to After Criticism, one of the series of ‘New Interventions in Art History’, Gavin Butt makes the point that there is a new unease at the heritage of criticism left by postmodernism itself, in which theory has been institutionalized, but that a way round this is by an acknowledgement that criticism ‘in order to remain criticism, of necessity has to situate itself para – against and/or beside – the doxa of received wisdom’ (Butt 2005: 5). He goes on to recommend Derrida’s remarks in Politics of Friendship in which the possibilities of communicative failure may allow for a new politics to come. I would like to use the quotation Butt takes from Derrida as this may point a way forward in my own deliberations:

But we cannot, and we must not, exclude the fact that when someone teaches, publishes, preaches, orders, promises, prophesies, informs or communicates, some force in him or her is also striving not to be understood, approved, accepted in consensus – not immediately, not fully, and therefore not in the immediacy and plenitude of tomorrow, etc...It is enough that the paradoxical structure of the condition of possibility be taken into account...for me to hope to be understood beyond all dialectics of misunderstanding, etc., the possibility of failure must, in addition, not be simply an accidental edge of the condition, but its haunting. (Derrida, quoted in Butt 2005: 6)

In addition to this, as Royle (2003) points out in his chapter on teaching, it is always impossible to know in advance what the learning outcomes of a lecture or lesson might be and that learning comes after the fact, that it is an operation of deferred action. As such, what I can gleam here is, at present, only the beginnings of what might emerge at some time in the future. And this is part of the pleasure of researching and writing, not just for immediate returns upon the intellectual labour expended, but for what might emerge in the future and where it might lead one.

Paradoxically, ‘the possibility of failure’ allows for greater communicative possibilities than the teleological certainty of some forms of ossified theory. At an earlier stage in this project I would have been (and was) mortified when I came across such words – they struck arrows of terror into my theoretical armour. Yet, as I continued on with this task the possibility of failure, or of not being able to say everything struck me again, but this time with joy. For not wanting to be definitive may allow for a greater degree of interaction with others who may or may not share my passion about these films. The dialogue does not have to be negatively figured according to critical viewpoints. For instance, some feminist critics may take me to task for my comments about the possibilities of reading Lynch’s treatment of women in another way which suggests that these films take their fundamental fantasies to their irrational conclusions and are therefore much more than just negatively figured misogynistic statements.

To see failure as a paradoxical form of success brings me back to Beckett and others for whom failure is the best we can hope for, and in Derrida’s analysis, allows for possibilities of politics yet to come. Ossified theory can only see what it wants it see, its teleological framework ignores or disregards that which falls outside its narrow parameters. In contrast, open, creative theory permits new questions to be asked as a means of questioning received wisdom. Like a young child who repeatedly asks ‘why?’ or like Renee Madison who says the same question sarcastically to Pete Drayton in the Lost Highway motel while being fucked by someone else, the word in its iteration and repetition is annoying and yet insistent, demanding a reply and not giving up until one is given, nor even then. It is a hysterical response which demands to be heard, demands to know and test the ‘master’s’ knowledge. It calls all into question and does not accept any reply but constantly tests what it is told.

This, for Jean-Michel Rabaté, is what properly constitutes, as the title of his book points out, The Future of Theory. He writes, ‘Unlike Kant’s reason, Theory can never be pure because it is always lacking, and this weakness is in fact its strength’ (Rabaté 2002: 9). This acknowledgement of lack, like Derrida’s of the possibility of failure, asks us to rethink what theory can and should do, to allow ‘it’ to remain open to the complex interweaving of critical discourse in an ever expanding semiosis.

It is through Lacan’s discourse of the hysteric that Rabaté suggests that theory may continue to question the ‘master’s’ knowledge, to unsettle and dislodge. And he calls for ‘sexy theory in that it always retains a libidinal edge, but at the same time it cannot bypass historical and political contexts’ (Rabaté 2002: 16–17). As he points out, the discourse of the hysteric appears as the result of the interaction between a divided subject and two terms: S1 – the master-signifier which will replace the lost object and S2 – unconscious knowledge which underwrites the pursuit of intellectual interests (Rabaté 2002: 15–16). In some of the existing responses to Lynch there is a sense in which the certainties of the critics close down these libidinal responses to the films. Rather than fully engaging with whatever it is that draws these critics to these works, there is an intellectual rationalizing of the irrational and excessive components of the cinematic signifiers.

Referring to the avant-garde’s relationship to theory, Rabaté makes the point that

Benjamin is indispensable for Theory precisely because his central obsession was to define modernity (a modernity that is not without its shadowy double of nostalgia) without having to believe in the myth of progress as Adorno did in the name of Marxism (Rabaté 2002: 64).

And it is Benjamin’s work on modernity that allows us to consider Lynch’s place within (post)modernity, where the shadowy underside, or supplement, of the myth of progress is displayed to us in the ruin of nature and the corruption of culture, as in Twin Peaks for example. Referring to Heidegger, Rabaté (2002: 115) suggests that ‘Theory is always caught up between comedy and tragedy’. Similarly, Lynch’s films straddle that same divide, making us aware of the comedic in the tragic and vice versa, offering complex interweaving of the sacred and the profane, the insightful and the banal.

Quilting points, reconsidered

Writing this book has provided me with a sustained period in which to explore my initial love of Lynch’s films, to ascertain what it is I love about them and how my thoughts and feelings relate to others who have commented upon the works. It has lead to a form of solitary and silent communication with the words of others. In relation to the field of film studies, I come away with a renewed sense of the importance of film being sited within the broader context of its socio-historical framework and its relation to other modes and technologies of representation. The specialization of the field, a necessity for its particular and singular workings to be investigated, also suggests that there may be, at times, something limiting in its subject specificity if the relationship of film to other cultural products is not fully considered. That film came into being, as does any technological invention, through the incorporation of older technologies into the ‘new’ – and that the ‘new’ is never entirely ‘new’ calls for a (re)consideration of the interlinking of film with other cultural artifacts. So, I suggest that what I have provided is a sense of the importance of considering cultural artifacts not only as specialized products of their own particular field, but also by reference to the wider culture from which they come, which allows for a greater sense of engagement with the socio-historical and cultural framework from which these objects arise.

The myth of theoretical distance, of the Cartesian all-knowing, God-guaranteed Gaze is also one that calls out for reconsideration. I started this work by being wary of my position of overproximity to the work, as if my personal engagement with the work would prohibit the distance required to ‘apply’ theory, to think about these works effectively without being seduced by them. Now I come to a realization that one needs to be aware of one’s investment in the work, from whatever angle one writes. There is no real sense of objectivity, or subjectivity. As Rabaté (2002: 16–17), referred to above, writes, the discourse of the hysteric is one in which the interaction between a divided, split subject and the two terms, S1 and S2, is one in which unconscious knowledge which underwrites intellectual interests helps to replace the lost object with the master-signifier, meaning that the pursuit of knowledge is itself an active, resourceful principle; it is a creative act from the arena of theory. In this space the attentive reading and viewing of the filmic texts enables the researcher to investigate fully the object of the study from the position of one who is passionately attached to it, but who can replace this initial attraction with a more considered, theoretical viewpoint by reconsidering the work alongside the various critical responses to arrive at a new, provisional point of knowledge. The work itself acts as the initial starting-point; being alive and attentive to it is vital if the bridge can be made between an individualized response and a more fully thought out reconsideration of the work in relation to the field of study and current cultural viewpoints. However, as I appropriate theory I do so with interest, from a particular point of view. At the same time, alternative and opposing viewpoints may provide for ways of thinking which force one to consider points outside the framework from which one works, to develop a praxis which confronts head-on problems and unpalatable questions that confront the researcher. This is not to say that one should give up one’s investment in a particular theoretical position, but rather, that one should actively confront challenges to that position in order to enrich the theory and praxis from which one works. This, in turn, can reinvigorate theory in relation to the demands and challenges presented by cultural products in the contemporary setting. In this way, theory is never predetermined, but is always receptive to the works it seeks to discuss.

The filmic texts may be fixed (although celluloid is rapidly deteriorating) but one’s critical responses may change, and the provisional and incomplete nature of writing about film and art needs to be understood for the positive means in which it can be harnessed to a constant, and consistent, re-evaluation of the objects of study. The individual responses of each commentator are themselves part of an ever-increasing web of critical discourse in which the complexities of the texts under consideration are open for investigation from a variety of positions, whose specificities, particularities, prejudices and biases offer the opportunity for theory and its others to interact in ever-creative ways.

By appropriating theory in the way I have done, it becomes clear that meaning is never entirely free-floating, that the quilting points of meaning come into being through the interaction of the hermeneutics of close reading and listening to both the filmic texts and the critical interactions with those texts. And maybe these quilting points are themselves multifaceted planes of connections whose interrogation may lead to other, new ways of integrating theory with practice in line with the demands of our era.

Tidying up ends

Where does all this leave me in my deliberations on film and writing? If, as Royle (2003: 81–82) and Bal (2001: xii) argue, critical writing is always a supplement and so is driven by the desire to accomplish the impossible – this must be true of writing on any work of art. Film’s specific forms of identification of this impossibility therefore must have something to do with the specificities or possibilities of film writing and their interrelationship. This connection between artistic form and critical responses reminds me of the work of the artist Mark Lewis whose name uncannily is the same as that of the central character in Michael Powell’s film Peeping Tom (1960) to which he has added his own ‘take’. However, I want to refer to another of his films entitled The Pitch (1998) in which the artist stands under a camera placed high above him at a railway station and reads out a text in defence of the lowly placed extra within the film industry. At the same time as members of the travelling public walk past they too become unknowing ‘extras’ in a film of which they do not realize that they are part of. Being a part of a film while not being aware of one’s participation strikes me as apposite to a form of writing that seeks to extend film, not close it down, in which the writing can become a supplementary part of that film by participating in its continuing life.

Rabaté (2002: 16) states that ‘since it retains a libidinal edge, Theory should not be boring; it should move, seduce, entrance, keep desire in motion, in other words, it should be “sexy”’. Likewise, in an essay on Twin Peaks entitled ‘Detective Deleuze and the Case of Slippery Signs’ Stephen O’Connell (1995: 15) quotes Deleuze when he states that one should ‘Give back to an artist a little of the joy, the energy, the love of life and politics that he knew how to invent’. And as Theory interlocks the private with the public, the psyche with the polis, the solitary illusion of cinema, in Schefer’s words, opens up a part of us that offers a possibility of becoming via a technology based on presence and absence, which calls forth the ghosts of Enlightenment rationality in all their glorious, libidinal jouissance in which writing can offer other traces of interaction with the films.

Film, as Barthes and so many others have told us, gives us the ghosts of the dead, and which in its momentary re-enactment brings back, flickeringly, to life what has gone but which can be called forth again via cinematic rebirth and DVD (as well as other forms of engagement such as the downloading of film direct to the computer). In terms of DVD, I often wonder, as I take these films from their cases, just what these little caskets mean and what they offer. And if writing is simultaneously a form of keeping alive while acknowledging death, then perhaps video and DVD can be thought of a form of relic, whereby a separation can be made between the filmic act in the cinema and its re-enactment by other means elsewhere. Because these ubiquitous objects which, on one hand, mark the extension of capitalism’s ability to make us repay for our pleasures as pure commodities, at the same time contain reliquary power which can be reactivated, or brought back to life at will, and are thereby themselves uncanny phenomena by which the magical strangeness of film and the commodity can be doubly reactivated and experienced time and time again.

By so doing the shock and pleasure of watching these films again may allow for a reconfiguration of what initially attracted us to them in the first place. From the initial shock of the first film screenings at the end of the nineteenth century, through to the current supersaturation of the commodity form, Lynch’s films may allow us to pass beyond contemporary ennui through their excessive playing out of cliché and postmodern distraction, to afford us the possibility of thinking anew, and of working towards fresh possibilities. As Schefer (1995: 112) states, in the quotation used in the introduction, the artificial solitude of cinema in which we are susceptible to meaning without signification through language, offers the possibility of rethinking or feeling anew the aphasia of feeling in our social being.

At this point, I am reminded of something else that Schefer writes about film:

So the duration of passions (what Kierkegaard used to call the character of an alternative man) can be measured only by the remnants of images – not by their cinematic duration, but by the power they have to remain, repeat, or recur. (Schefer 1995: 114)

And these images have for me a great power to remain, repeat and recur; and so it would seem for others, whatever forms of disavowal are put forward. This seems to suggest that these films call for greater critical treatments, where the various ‘extra’ voices might be heard, and where communication and discussion might lead to renewed ways of thinking and dealing with our passionate attachments and distractions.

For while my approach takes on board various theoretical positions what strikes me is the way in which those approaches which seek to distance themselves from psychoanalysis are indebted to it as a discourse. So, for instance, whilst Schefer is not a psychoanalytic thinker, many of his ideas about film can be seen to interlink or relate to contemporary psychoanalytic ways of thinking about film, albeit in other ways. Similarly, while Derrida and deconstruction, and Deleuze and Guattari contest psychoanalytic theory, their work, at the same time, is heavily indebted to it. This is something that Royle (2003), although adopting a deconstructive approach, makes plain throughout his book on the uncanny and why we will/should read Freud for a long time to come. We can also see that although the post-theory work seeks to distance itself from psychoanalytic points of view, it has to dialectically interact with it as a discourse. So, while these debates continue there is an ongoing sense of intellectual development of ideas which can only be a healthy thing. And I would contend that Lynch’s films provide us with a complex body of work through which many important theoretical issues can be thought and written about. So, we need to go beyond binaries of subjective/objective, good/bad, reactionary/progressive, to interrogate the points de capiton where meaning might be seen to reside currently, but where it can also be rethought as the unthought, ‘as that impossibility of thinking which doubles or hollows out the inside’ (Deleuze 1988: 97). A theoretical openness or promiscuousness, without exclusion of what yet may come, may provide for a weaving together of differing theoretical approaches to lead to an increasingly developed sense of engagement with the vicissitudes of cultural artifacts.

Figure 30: Nikki Grace/Susan Blue (and the spectator) entering a film painting where nothing is quite what it seems, INLAND EMPIRE (2006).

Notes

1. Perversely, iek claims this to be his favourite Lynch film and although it was generally a failure at the box office it was well received in France. See Sheen (2004) for a discussion of the relationship between the film and New Hollywood.

2. For more general details and discussion of the Lacanian objet (petit) a see Evans (1996: 124–126) and Fink (1995).

3. See Buci-Glucksmann (1994: 101, and 105, note 15) in which she points out that ‘Lacan’s reference to the stone phallus comes from “La Relation d’objet”, unpublished seminar of 5 December 1956, quoted in Monique David-Ménard, L’Hystérique entre Freud et Lacan, Paris: Éditions universitaires 1983, p.203’.

4. See William Paul (1997: 321–347) for a discussion about the uncanny nature of (early) film and the failed attempts to ‘tame’ it in the new exhibition theatres.