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March 6 - March 25, 2020
For Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault, writing is a better animal than speech because it is iterable; it is iterable because it is abstract; and it is abstract because it is a function not of presence but of absence: the reader’s absent when the writer’s writing, and the writer’s absent when the reader’s reading.
“the assumption of homogeneity,” simplistically regarding “author” as referring to “a unitary entity or phenomenon.” If we examine the way “author” is really used in critical discourse, Hix argues, we are forced to see the word’s denotation as really a complex interaction of the activities of the “historical writer” (the guy with the pencil), that writer’s influences and circumstances, the narrative persona adopted in a text, the extant text itself, the critical atmosphere that surrounds and informs the interpretation of the text, the individual reader’s actual interpretations of the text, and
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This attitude—like Lynch himself, like his work—seems to me to be both admirable and sort of nuts.
In short, Dune’s direction called for a combination technician and administrator, and Lynch, though as good a technician as anyone in film, 5 is more like the type of bright child you sometimes see who’s ingenious at structuring fantasies and gets totally immersed in them but will let other kids take part in them only if he retains complete imaginative control over the game and its rules and appurtenances—in short very definitely not an administrator.
“The experience taught me a valuable lesson,” he told an interviewer years later. “I learned I would rather not make a film than make one where I don’t have final cut.”
a distinctively homemade film (the home being, again, D. Lynch’s skull),
Whether you believe he’s a good auteur or a bad one, his career makes it clear that he is indeed, in the literal Cahiers du Cinema sense, an auteur, willing to make the sorts of sacrifices for creative control that real auteurs have to make—choices that indicate either raging egotism or passionate dedication or a childlike desire to run the whole sandbox, or all three.
and again we get the feeling that relationships in this movie are not what you would call open and sharing, etc.
a creepy blend of avuncular affection and patronizing ferocity.
For me, Lynch’s movies’ deconstruction of this weird “irony of the banal” has affected the way I see and organize the world.
I’ve noted since 1986 that a good 65% of the people in metropolitan bus terminals between the hours of midnight and 6:00 A.M. tend to qualify as Lynchian figures—flamboyantly unattractive, enfeebled, grotesque, freighted with a woe out of all proportion to evident circumstances.
ambit
as a touchstone, a set of allusive codes and contexts in the viewer’s deep-brain core.
otiose
i.e. faster, linearer, and with what was idiosyncratically surreal now made fashionably (i.e. “hiply”) surreal.
9a a better way to put what i just tried to say Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching somebody’s ear getting cut off; David Lynch is interested in the ear.
jejune
Lynch’s movies are inarguably creepy, and a big part of their creepiness is that they seem so personal A kind way to put it is that Lynch seems to be one of these people with unusual access to their own unconscious. A less kind way to put it would be that Lynch’s movies seem to be expressions of certain anxious, obsessive, fetishistic, Oedipally arrested, borderlinish parts of the director’s psyche, expressions presented with very little inhibition or semiotic layering, i.e. presented with something like a child’s ingenuous (and sociopathic) lack of self-consciousness. It’s the psychic
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The absence of linearity and narrative logic, the heavy multivalence of the symbolism, the glazed opacity of the characters’ faces, the weird ponderous quality of the dialogue, the regular deployment of grotesques as figurants, the precise, painterly way scenes are staged and lit, and the overlush, possibly voyeuristic way that violence, deviance, and general hideousness are depicted—these all give Lynch’s movies a cool, detached quality, one that some cinéastes view as more like cold and clinical.
inflated parodies of Faulknerian passion;
nodes of identification and engines of emotional pain.
Movies are an authoritarian medium. They vulnerabilize you and then dominate you. Part of the magic of going to a movie is surrendering to it, letting it dominate you.
This is one of the unsettling things about a Lynch movie: you don’t feel like you’re entering into any of the standard unspoken/unconscious contracts you normally enter into with other kinds of movies. This is unsettling because in the absence of such an unconscious contract we lose some of the psychic protections we normally (and necessarily) bring to bear on a medium as powerful as film. That is, if we know on some level what a movie wants from us, we can erect certain internal defenses that let us choose how much of ourselves we give away to it.
picayune
LA in January, though, turns out to be plenty Lynchian in its own right. Surreal/banal juxtapositions and interpenetrations are everyplace you look.
précis
the odd aquarial stillness that tends to precede Midwestern thunderstorms.
obstreperous
plus in general the recreational-chemical vibe around these more technical blue-collar guys is very decidedly not a beer-type vibe.
insouciantly pretty,
weltschmerzian
everybody on the crew springs into frantic but purposeful action so that from the specular vantage of the roadside cliff the set resembles an anthill that’s been stirred with a stick.
in clusters of entomological-looking avidity and efficiency.
He’s the sort who manages to appear restful even in activity; i.e. he looks both very alert and very calm.
“This film represents schizophrenia performatively, not just representationally. This is done in terms of loosening of identity, ontology, and continuity in time.”
a creepily Reaganesque ruddiness,
The films are all about tensions, but these tensions are always in and between individuals. There are, in Lynch’s movies, no real groups or associations. There are sometimes alliances, but these are alliances based on shared obsessions. Lynch’s characters are essentially alone (Alone): they’re alienated from pretty much everything except the particular obsessions they’ve developed to help ease their alienation (… or is their alienation in fact a consequence of their obsessions? and does Lynch really hold an obsession or fantasy or fetish to be any kind of true anodyne for human alienation?
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“The question for Bill and Balthazar is what kind of woman-hater is Fred [-dash-Pete]? Is he the kind of woman-hater who goes out with a woman and fucks her and then never calls her again, or is he the kind who goes out with a woman and fucks her and then kills her? And the real question to explore is: how different are these kinds?”
inveterate
epiphanic
Lynch’s loyalty to actors and his homemade, co-op-style productions make his oeuvre a veritable pomo-anthill of interfilm connections.
classical Expressionist cinema tradition of Wiene, Kobe, early Lang, etc.
They’ve noted the preponderance of fetishes and fixations in Lynch’s work, his characters’ lack of conventional introspection (an introspection which in film equals “subjectivity”), his sexualization of everything from an amputated limb to a bathrobe’s sash, from a skull to a “heart plug,” 43 from split lockets to length-cut timber.
these very heavy Freudian riffs are powerful instead of ridiculous because they’re deployed Expressionistically, which among other things means they’re deployed in an old-fashioned, pre-postmodern way, i.e. nakedly, sincerely, without postmodernism’s abstraction or irony.
the remarkable unself-consciousness that’s kind of the hallmark of Expressionist art—nobody in Lynch’s movies analyzes or metacriticizes or hermeneuticizes or anything, 44 including Lynch himself.
What he is is a weird hybrid blend of classical Expressionist and contemporary postmodernist, an artist whose own “internal impressions and moods” are (like ours) an olla podrida of neurogenic predisposition and phylogenic myth and psychoanalytic schema and pop-cultural iconography—in other words, Lynch is sort of G. W. Pabst with an Elvis ducktail.
The difference between experiencing art that succeeds as communication and art that doesn’t is rather like the difference between being sexually intimate with a person and watching that person masturbate. In terms of literature, richly communicative Expressionism is epitomized by Kafka, bad and onanistic Expressionism by the average Graduate Writing Program avant-garde story.
we were also starting to recognize that most of our own avant-garde stuff really was solipsistic and pretentious and self-conscious and masturbatory and bad,
the way the movie’s surrealism and dream-logic felt: they felt true, real.
it wasn’t just that these touches seemed eccentrically cool or experimental or arty, but that they communicated things that felt true.
