THERE’S AN EARLY David Lynch film called The Amputee. Two films, in fact: he made it twice, with the same script, same shots, same everything. Explaining the duplication years later, he tells his interviewer that the American Film Foundation wanted to test two types of video stock, so he used the opportunity to produce a short, recording it on both types for comparison. He did this not without misgivings: that the American Film Foundation should be consorting with a format that might turn out to be film’s nemesis “gave me a sadness.” In the film itself, a woman with two stumps instead of legs is seen writing a letter, while an audio voiceover renders the content of this silent process. The content itself is pretty conventional, involving some interpersonal psychological entanglement or other. But this is relegated to the background: the film’s prime action, what we actually see, is a nurse dressing the stumps: unraveling bandages, pumping liquid over mounds of misformed scar-tissue, letting it drain and dribble out of cavities and craters. Pure Lynch already: a ghoulish fascination with traumatized flesh and its contortions, set against a backdrop of anxiety about the medium, the very material, in which the drama is being rendered.
Try to count the instances of deformity in Lynch’s work—of dwarves, cripples and characters missing arms and legs—or of people being deformed on camera (having their limbs chopped off, blown off or carried off by dogs), and you’ll lose count pretty quickly. To interpret Lynch’s repeated featuring of disability as a liberal, “equal-opportunity” type gesture would be wildly wide of the mark; yet seeing it as a kind of shorthand for moral perversity, like Richard III’s hunched back in Shakespeare’s play, would be just as wide. Deformity, for Lynch, is not simply thematic: it is, we could say, only slightly punning, instrumental. What the continual, almost systematic replacement in his films of body parts and faculties by instruments—by crutches, wheelchairs, hearing aids and ever-weirder apparatuses sometimes as large as rooms—produces is a whole prosthetic order, a world of which prosthesis is not just a feature but a fundamental term, an ontological condition. And the implications of this world, this order, are, as Lynch himself might put it, big.
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FOR FREUD, prosthesis is the essence of technology. “With all his tools,” he writes in Civilization and its Discontents, “man improves his own organs, both motor and sensory, or clears away the barriers to their functioning.” Ships, airplanes, telescopes and cameras, gramophones and telephones—all these afford man the omnipotence and omniscience he attributes to his gods, thus making him “eine Art Prosthesengott”: a kind of god with artificial limbs, a prosthetic god. “When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent,” Freud writes; “but” (he continues) “those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times.” Man’s technological appendages both enhance and diminish him. It’s what Hal Foster, in his book Prosthetic Gods, calls “the double logic of the prosthesis”: an addition that threatens, or marks, a subtraction.
This double logic is writ large in Lynch’s films. That Geoffrey’s father in Blue Velvet is strapped up, astronaut-like, to apparati of the highest order is due not to some heroic cosmic voyaging but rather to his having been struck down by a heart attack, immobilized, made pathetic; meeting Geoffrey’s gaze with his, all he can do is cry. As Geoffrey returns from visiting him in hospital this same logic is expanded to provide the film’s inciting incident: his discovery, among waste ground, of a severed ear heralds the onset of a world of amplified, recorded and transmitted sound, where Dorothy Vallens sings into trademark Lynchean microphones, Frank Booth and his entourage mime to tape cassettes, and crackling walkie-talkies hold the key to life and death. This world is both exhilarating and threatening. And its onset actually came much sooner in Lynch’s oeuvre than Geoffrey’s discovery of the severed natural organ it replaces: from the opening seconds of Eraserhead we’re immersed in what sounds like a mixture of loudspeaker static and industrial noise, a neo-Rilkean Gerausch that represents nothing but sheer, mechanical technology, reified and roaring. Off in a signal-box somewhere, a sweaty, tar-coated figure yanks a lever and a homunculus-like thought-conception slips out of Henry’s brain. His biological and mental life already outsourced to machines, Henry ends the film becoming one himself, his head fed through a pencil-shaping press whose cogs and belts and punchers move with an automated regularity that’s suggestive of the action of a Steenbeck editing machine or cinema projector. If we bear in mind that the young, broke Lynch, like the pen-and pencil-carrying Henry prior to being laid off, held down a day job as a printer, and has professed through his career an admiration for the writer (and clerical pencil pusher) Kafka, whose presence haunts Eraserhead, then it almost seems as though what we’re witnessing is literature’s own extension, its simultaneous dismemberment and augmentation, into the medium of cinema, which serves as its prosthesis. But that’s by the by: what’s certain is that Henry is transformed, and that his transformation is not only physical but metaphysical as well. The shavings of his brain become glittering constellations, like Greek heroes turning into gods, and an angelic singer lurking in the radiator (which itself is panned to from the gramophone: the metaphysics, for Lynch, always lie in the machine) sings to him of heaven. It’s an exaltation—and its opposite, a complete abjection: the angel is disgusting, grossly deformed, and Henry, trapped in the hellhole of his flat, has killed his son, gone mad and been tried, condemned and decapitated.
Technology, as our prosthesis, makes us godlike and less-than-human in one and the same move: that we know. But it gets more complex: technology, in Lynch’s work, is itself degraded. The machinery surrounding Henry isn’t the streamlined gadgetry of a future techno-utopia but rather the decaying and run-down relics of an exhausted industrial past: barely functioning lifts whose cables feebly whirr, old pipes and half-dead factories whose steam wheezes as sickly as the lungs of his diseased child. At play is not just a double logic but a double-double logic, in which the realm of the technological is as two-sided as the mankind it pushes and pulls in two directions. The bare-topped, tar-coated god who pulls the levers that control Henry’s destiny is, like the disfigured angel-lady, disease-ridden, with plague-like boils across his face and chest. Nonetheless, the relationship between him and Henry is one of operator-operated.
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HERE WE COME ACROSS another way to think about prosthesis: as a form of puppetry. In his 1810 story-cum-essay “On the Marionette Theatre,” the German Romantic writer Heinrich von Kleist recounts a meeting, in a fairground, with a choreographer who, watching marionettes being manipulated, marvels at the way in which dance “could be entirely transferred to the realm of mechanical forces” and “controlled by a crank.” “Have you heard,” the choreographer asks the narrator, “of the artificial legs designed by English craftsmen for those unfortunates who have lost their limbs?” The implication is clear: prosthetic-clad man is like a puppet—which begs the question: who’s the puppeteer?
This question is a central one for Lynch. His films abound in instances of control, in scenes in which control itself is dramatized. “I can make him do anything I please!” Frank boasts to brothel owner Ben of his captive Geoffrey; his other captive, Dorothy, he manipulates night after night, telling her “Sit down!”; “Open your legs!”; “Don’t look at me!” Dorothy then does the same to Geoffrey, holding a knife to his throat and hissing at him “Undress!” or, later, “Hit me!”—both of which he does. The Elephant Man, which, like Kleist’s text, opens in a nineteenth-century fair-ground in which puppets are displayed, sees John Merrick being alternately bullied into standing up and turning round to order for the paying carny public and more kindly but no less decisively prompted to perform the same maneuvers by his doctor, who then teaches him to speak and tells him what to say.
Telling people what to say, how to move their body or where to direct their gaze is, of course, part and parcel of making films, and, to a degree, we have to recognize in all these instances of control a kind of mise-en-abîme of Lynch’s own role as a director. But there’s a metaphysical dimension to it too. For Kleist, puppetry lays bare a complex process through which man, robbed of the pure, naive grace of a puppet by self-consciousness, might regain it by advancing so far into knowledge that he re-emerges on the other side to “appear most pure in that human form which either has no consciousness at all or possesses infinite consciousness—that is, either in a marionette or in a god”—an event, the choreographer informs the narrator, that would constitute “the last chapter in the history of the world.” Think of the network of control in Wild at Heart: it also has a metaphysical dimension: divine and supernatural forces, voodoo priestesses and witches. As Marianna makes a call to Santos, who calls the shamanic-sounding Mr. Reindeer, who calls calliper-clad Grace Zabriskie, who calls Bobby Peru, all of them exchanging phrases of an incantatory character, like spells, she watches Sailor and Lulu’s progress in her glass ball, as though she were Athena gazing down on Odysseus’s troubled journey home. As Lulu becomes all too aware as she watches the Wicked Witch ride along beside their car, mortals are mingling with gods, not all of them good ones. In describing Bobby Peru as “a dark angel,” she’s not simply using figurative speech: called down upon them from the elevated realm that arches over terrestrial space like a telefiber-theo-optic mesh, he is one.
Wild at Heart’s main template, which, alongside its apocalyptic images of ozone-depleted heat-death and mass automobile carnage, it keeps self-consciously invoking, is the ultimate cinematic fable of divinity and puppetry: The Wizard of Oz, in which the god who controls everything and can make all things happen turns out, at the end of the technicolor rainbow, to be no more than a feeble man cranking a crappy, low-tech, carny-type contraption. Incredibly, mainstream, commercial cinema managed to enact in 1939 the subversive fantasy that William Burroughs would spend decades toiling in the underground and avant-garde to formulate: the fantasy that the Control Room or Reality Studio that maintains the illusion that in turn conserves repressive order can be revealed for what it is, rumbled and blown open. For Burroughs, this day, when it arrives, will not only prompt panicked cries that “the director is on set,” but also herald the end of the film—that is, perhaps, the end of time, and, certainly, the death of God (who, after all, is no more than a hack director, a degenerate crank-operator whose power over us makes “ventriloquist dummies” of us). Here, again, we come back to prosthesis: for Burroughs, God is like an irksome and unnecessary limb or organ. Learning of a tribe whose small toes (quite unnecessary for stability) are genetically programed to self-amputate in adolescence, he pictures God, too, withering and dropping off. “He atrophied and fell off me like horrible old gills,” he has a putative “survivor” of this miracle (or counter-miracle) confide to a journalist, “And I feel ever so much better.”
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WITH ALL THIS IN MIND, then, I want to look, quickly, at the triumvirate of what, if Lynch receives his full critical due in future years, will probably come to be referred to, á la Shakespeare, as his “problem films”: the ones that, lacking a stable reality field, are fraught with ontological discrepancies.
The first of these, Lost Highway, is an orgy of deformity and bodily shut-down. Fred doesn’t simply murder Renee, he dismembers her; Richard Prior makes a final film appearance, all decrepit in his wheelchair; there’s the dwarfish Mystery Man with his telephone, another big prosthetic ear (in the course of inventing the telephone, Alexander Bell stole a corpse’s ear so he could mechanically reproduce its inner workings; both his mother and his wife were deaf ). The Mystery Man, with his illuminated face, is also a kind of angel: here, too, humans mix with gods—and do so through a technologically-enabled interface of videos and sound equipment, fine-tuned (and not so fine-tuned) car engines and wireless sets. If Eraserhead’s mechanics are run down, Lost Highway’s supernatural realm of technology is blighted too, glitch-ridden: burglar alarms disabled, tapes peppered with white noise, radios prone to interference from the other channel.
What’s this film about? The same as all of Lynch’s films: the outsourcing of the self and of reality to their prostheses—and the outsourcing of what is at once the triumph and catastrophe of God’s death to the prosthetic realm as well. God dies in Lost Highway, make no mistake: Dick Laurent—note the initials: DL—the one who makes the porno movies running on a loop in the control room of desire, is butchered gruesomely in front of the Mystery Man’s camera; as he dies, he half-quotes Burroughs’s refrain about his prime God-stand-in, The Ugly American, telling Fred: “You and me Mister: we can really out-ugly them sum-bitches, can’t we?” Time, at this point, reaches the end of its reel, comes full circle, and the film ends with the same, Nietzschean announcement it began with: “Dick Laurent is dead.” Slavoj Žižek, pondering this line, sees it as a carrier of a psychoanalytic Real that circularly reasserts itself through the repetition of a moment in the linguistic chain, a phrase. But it’s not just a phrase: it’s a phrase spoken through the intercom—yet another electronic ear that extends its owner’s reach beyond the borders of his house but also leaves him open to infection, to unwittingly inviting strangers in. I’m tempted to say that the film, ultimately, is about the intercom itself. Talk, Listen, Door—the three terms written above its buttons—contain the sum of all its moves. But the prosthetic ear will have to share star billing with the big prosthetic eye—which makes the Mystery Man the “realest,” most objective character in the whole film, by virtue of the fact that it is he who holds this eye: he is quite simply, like the star of Dziga Vertov’s landmark film of the same name, the Man with the Movie Camera.
The same state of affairs persists in Mulholland Drive. People who try to work out what’s “really” going on in it are wasting their time, since the whole drama of the film is that of a reality-field trying to hold itself together after its sovereign guarantor (in this case, not an over-virile father figure but rather the female object of an obsessive lesbian love) has been assassinated. It tries (and fails, and tries again) to do this through the medium of film—the narratives, scripts, and personae of Hollywood. Only the reel is real. The man in the Control Room this time—Mr. Roke—is almost pure prosthesis, his already tiny, crippled body dwarfed yet further by the spacious, hi-tech chamber from which, via intercom again, he calls the shots. In an astonishing scene involving human puppetry, the heroines attend a cabaret that’s all mechanics, with the singer miming to a pre-recorded tape. What’s astonishing about the scene is not that the artifice is unmasked (indeed, it’s even announced by the compère at the show’s outset), but rather the inversion that takes place: as the tape plays, Betty shakes, literally “moved” by it; then, as the singer mouths along to the words estoy llorando, “I am crying,” she and Rita cry! Technology is no longer an appendage to the human; rather, humans have become technology’s prosthesis.
By Inland Empire, it’s no longer even tiny humans occupying the central chamber but, rather, mechanical rabbits, moving robotically to canned laughter. In the Control Room, the marionettes: the puppets operate us. Opening with a close-up shot of speeding gramophone grooves overlaid with the crackling announcement of a radio play, then cutting straight to CCTV images of people with blanked-out faces, then to a woman watching television—four media profiled in less than as many minutes—the film announces at its outset that its subject will be mediation itself. What follows is all glitch, all interference, slippage between one reality-field and another as lines, situations and identities morph into and out of one another, quasi-repeating. “There’s a vast network,” says Freddy, “an ocean of possibilities.” It’s this network that “Nikki” navigates, encountering an architecture that, I’d suggest, can best be understood as “digital”—digital in the strict computing sense of information storage, relay and configuration. Like a gamer, she must find her way towards the inner chamber, negotiating levels that regress and embed each other; like a hacker, she must crack its source code, break the game’s own system, bring it crashing down. To put it in Kleistian terms, she must come to the point where no consciousness and infinite consciousness coincide, gods and marionettes become one, the world’s last chapter. Not only is this logic digital; the medium in which it takes place, the very matter on which Lynch shot it, is as well. What’s been amputated, cut, removed from this film is the film itself, replaced not (as in The Amputee) by video but by virtual technology, the ones and zeros of computer code.
The world’s last chapter; cinema’s prosthesis. This, perhaps, is what we’re witnessing at Inland Empire’s end. Against the agonized apocalyptic ecstasy of Nina Simone’s “Sinner-man,” a song that tells of what happens at time’s end, “all on them day,” a girl who, with a gear stick for a leg, embodies all the amputees and car-crash victims, all the dwarves, puppets and freaks in Lynch’s oeuvre, hobbles onto a stage on which all the film’s players, revels ended now, are gathered—and, surveying the scene with a smile, murmurs: “Sweet.”
2009