CINEMATIC MEANING IN THE WORK OF DAVID LYNCH:
Revisiting Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, Lost Highway, & Mullholland Drive
originally published in CINEACTION #67
Introduction:
What does a Gap commercial have to do with Mulholland Drive?
Mulholland Drive, David Lynch’s most recent, and most popularly acclaimed, film opens with a montage that multiplies the image of young couples dancing the jitterbug against a solid purple backdrop. This sequence is clearly modeled on a series of Gap ads that featured attractive young couples swing dancing against brightly colored monochrome backdrops and which were all over the airwaves around the time Lynch originally shot Mulholland Drive as a TV pilot in 1998. It may strike us as odd that the director of Eraserhead (1979), whose name can hardly appear in print without adjectives like ‘cult’ ‘weird’, ‘bizarre’, ‘surreal’, and ‘disturbing’, would start a film with a reference to a Gap commercial. And yet the sequence is in many ways in keeping with Lynch’s other work. In the sequence, the excessively inflated, artificial exuberance of the commercials is pushed to its extreme so that, as the up-tempo swing music escalates and brightly lit shots of an impossibly happy young woman accompanied by an eerily grinning elderly couple begin to flicker on and off the screen, the atmosphere crosses over from energetic and fun to discomforting, even menacing. It is as if the sequence cannot sustain the counterfeit sense of joy that it is trying to convey and cannot manage to conceal the uneasiness and desperation that are lurking just beneath the surface of the image. Since as far back as Blue Velvet (1986) Lynch has relished in staging iconic or clichéd images of American culture and then revealing the disturbing resonances of what they are concealing. In this sense, the jitterbug sequence just enacts in a condensed form a complex ambivalence at the heart of Lynch’s aesthetic: the way the cinematic image[1] can create a moments of startling power and irresistible appeal while at the same time revealing itself as an illusion, an artifice concealing something disturbing that we don’t want to acknowledge.
However, the sequence also points to a relatively new aspect of Lynch’s cinema. In Blue Velvet or the Twin Peaks television series, the iconic or clichéd images that Lynch subverts seem culled from some sense of collective cultural consciousness and are not explicitly related to the cinematic image. Even the multiple references to The Wizard of Oz around which Wild at Heart (1990) is structured seem rooted in Oz’s mythological status within popular cultural more than in how it functions specifically as a work of cinema. However, starting with Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992) and Lost Highway (1997), and culminating in Mulholland Drive (2001), which is set in Hollywood and introduces the filmmaking process into the narrative itself, there seems to be an increasing desire or willingness on Lynch’s part to openly reflect on the process by which cinematic meaning is made and the implications this has for the role of the cinematic image within our culture, as well the consequences it has for Lynch’s own cinematic practices. This recent focus of Lynch’s work has received almost no attention from critics and commentators. This may be understandable to a certain degree considering that it’s most explicit manifestation was in the latest film; before the release of Mulholland Drive it may have been difficult to perceive any significant links between Fire Walk with Me, which was considered an aberration by most at the time of its release, and Lost Highway, which seemed to indicate something of a new direction for Lynch. Compounding this problem is the fact that both of the major books on Lynch, Michel Chion’s David Lynch and Martha P. Nochimson’s The Passion of David Lynch, were written before the release of Lost Highway (both books do have codas briefly discussing the film, though Chion’s is only available in an untranslated 1997 French edition). However, aside from matters of timing, this is also indicative of an unfortunate trend that has developed in the critical community concerning Lynch. There is a persistent reluctance to enter into a serious, in-depth examination of Lynch’s work; with a few exceptions--- including the works by Michel Chion and Martha P. Nochimson, as well as Slavoj Zizek’s study of Lost Highway, which I will discuss below--- the predominant attitude seems to be that whatever Lynch is up to, you are free to love it or hate it but there is no use trying too hard to figure it out. Now, a reluctance to over-rationalize or definitively interpret every aspect of Lynch’s films is of course understandable and appropriate. However, this is quite different from the refusal to engage in any detailed analysis that we encounter in most of what is written about Lynch. Whether he is being lauded as innovated and daring (Stephen Holden on Mulholland Drive: “By surrendering any semblance of rationality to create a post-Freudian, pulp-fiction fever dream of a movie, Mr. Lynch ends up shooting the moon”) or maligned as self-indulgent, even immoral (Roger Ebert on Lost Highway: “it really is all an empty stylistic facade. This movie is about design, not cinema… I felt jerked around.”), critics rarely make much effort to support their opinions with a carefully considered reading of the films. (It is not surprising that of all the writings on Mulholland Drive that I have encountered, only one article written by Bill Wyman, Max Garrone and Andy Klein for Salon.com even mentions the resemblance of the jitterbug sequence to the Gap ads.) I will try to investigate the unique nature of Lynch’s increasing interest in explicitly exploring the function of the cinematic image, through a close examination of certain prevalent aspects of Fire Walk with Me, Lost Highway, and Mulholland Drive. This will bring us face to face with a number of interrelated issues at the heart of Lynch’s cinema, including the question of authenticity, or the ‘Real’, the role of emotion/affect, and Lynch’s relationship to postmodernism.
Lynch, Postmodernism, and the ‘Real’
The new directness that characterizes Lynch’s recent explorations of how the cinematic image generates meaning materializes in a few basic ways basic ways. One of the most noticeable of these is an increasing number of explicit allusions, references, and quotations of other films, especially in Lost Highway, with its multiple references to, among other things, Maya Deren’s Meshes in the Afternoon and to Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly, and Mulholland Drive which also features a multiple references, including nods to Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard and Ingmar Berman’s Persona, as well as numerous allusions to Lynch’s own previous films. I will discuss how this functions in more detail later, but first a few preliminary remarks are in order. The first thing that needs to be addressed is the fact that Lynch’s use of reference and quotation does not seem to fit comfortably within any of the theoretical frameworks that are usually used to discuss these techniques. This may be why these aspects of his recent films have been overlooked.
As Zizek notes at the beginning of The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime, it is relatively common for theorists and critics to refer to David Lynch in passing as a postmodern filmmaker (Zizek, 3). In a way this is not surprising. Lynch’s films contain a self-conscious mixture of ‘high art’ and ‘popular culture’ and an abundance of references to other films, and seem to emphasize dazzling stylistic surfaces over narrative coherence. All of this does situate his work within a host of postmodern issues. In Zizek’s words, “the enigma of the coincidence of opposites” that one finds in Lynch’s work “is in many ways the enigma of postmodernity itself”(3). However, when one examines Lynch’s films closely, his relationship to postmodernism becomes more problematic, as most of the substantial studies of his work acknowledge, implicitly or explicitly (neither Chion, nor Nochimson, nor Zizek suggest that reading Lynch’s work in relationship to postmodernism is a useful approach). For instance, Lynch’s cinematic references and quotations seem to operate quite differently from the way postmodernism conceives of theses devices. Postmodernism claims that the ‘Real’ is inaccessible and cannot be directly represented and thus sees the film and television image as inevitably separated from the ‘Real’ by an infinite layers of representational forms. Thus, the important consideration is to gauge the effects of representation and to deploy the strategies of representation that are most desirable in any given case (the nature of this desirability depending on the aims of the artist…). It is to this end that postmodernism embraces devices such as inter-textual references, the mixing of heterogeneous stylistic forms (pastiche) and the subversion of conventional narrative modes. Lynch’s reference are taken from a broad range of cinematic genres and periods-- from early experimental cinema to television commercials to European art films to classical Hollywood--- but the effect of these is markedly different from what is usually considered a postmodern pastiche. Unlike, say, Todd Haynes’ use of Sirkian melodrama in Far from Heaven, Lynch’s allusions do not function as references to specific, fixed cinematic codes that he wishes to speak through, or to speak of. Nor do Lynch’s allusions function as mosaics or pastiches of cinematic surfaces in the same way as do the quotation-packed films of Guy Maddin or Quentin Tarantino (two otherwise dissimilar postmodern filmmakers). Nor, on the other hand, do Lynch’s references function in the more modernist sense as attempts to self-consciously link him up fraternally to a recognized tradition or history of the cinema---his allusions are far too idiosyncratic and eclectic for that (after all what cinematic trajectory could possibly include both Maya Deren and a Gap commercial?). In fact, when Lynch references Sunset Boulevard in Mulholland Drive, his aim does not even seem to be to make his film look or feel like Wilder’s in any recognizable way.
So we must ask ourselves: what is Lynch’s relationship to the films that he references, and how is it fundamentally different from what is usually considered a postmodern perspective? One of the main differences is that Lynch does not seem to consider cinematic styles and genres as fixed modes of representation that construct various notions of a ‘Real’ to which we can never have direct immediate access. How then does the notion of the ‘Real’ function in Lynch’s work? As I will try to illustrate, for Lynch, the cinematic image is capable of achieving a specifically cinematic ‘Real’; that is to say that for Lynch the cinema is capable of generating meaning in a way that connects us with an aspect of the ‘Real’ in a more direct and immediate way than is possible in everyday experience. (This is only an aspect of the ‘Real,’ which can still never be wholly divulged, but this position is quite different from the postmodern notion that the ‘Real’ is inaccessible in any direct way at all, and that representation ultimately speaks only of itself.) Lynch’s allusions and quotations all function to reveal the nature of his concept of the cinematic ‘Real’ through instances of its presence in other films. What is essential about this notion of a cinematic ‘Real’ is that the cinematic image does not attempt to represent the ‘Real’ (as both modernism and postmodernism claim), rather it creates a visceral affecting experience for the spectator which opens up access to the ‘Real’ in a unique and powerful way; the ‘Real’ is accessed not through the act of representation, but through the experience of mediation.
In this sense, Nochimson is correct when she says of Lynch, "His belief in the image as a possible bridge to the real does not depend on any abstract framework, rather on a visceral sense of the essential truth of an empathetic[…] relationship with art." (Nochimson, 9). However, for Nochimson, this “bridge to the real” has to do with allowing “the finer aspects of our subconscious energies” to “conform us to the life-affirming energies of nature”(10). However, attempting to fit Lynch’s aesthetic into this sort of questionable psycho-cosmological system is unnecessary and only further obscures what is actually going on in his films. This is true of any attempt to bring Lynch’s work in line with some preexisting theory or system of ideas. This is not to say that one shouldn’t ever examine the relationship between Lynch’s films and these types of theoretical frameworks, but first one must try to account for the way in which cinematic meaning is generated and defined within films themselves--- especially since this is has become such an explicit aspect of his recent work. Despite this however, Nochimson’s idea about an empathetic relationship to art in Lynch’s work do seem to me to indicate a valuable approach, and I will return to this idea later.
On the opposite spectrum, Zizek rejects the “New Age” reading of Lynch (Zizek, 22), of which he finds Nochimson’s book “exemplary”, and instead attempts a Lacanian reading of Lynch. Essentially, Zizek sees Lynch’s films as attempts to bring the spectator to a confrontation with “the comic horror of the fundamental fantasy”---the Lacanian ‘Real-impossible’ which can never be directly accessed, the unnamable trauma or objectless desire that is not grounded in reality and always eludes representation through being staged directly as fantasy (Zizek, 43-44). Regardless of the legitimacy of his Lacanian interpretation (on which I am not qualified to comment), Zizek does touch upon what seems to me an important aspect of Lynch’s cinema. When we examine Lynch’s recent work closely, I think that we will find that ultimately for Lynch affect and emotion--- and the point at which they become indistinguishable--- are at the core of the cinematic ‘Real’ and that the road to this ‘Real’ is desire. Zizek’s comments fit well with my belief that in Lynch’s work an understanding of the cinema emerges which defines itself as a powerful force that enables viewers to viscerally experience affect and emotion in unique way that is detached from any rational, narrative cause and effect structure. I will get into the implications of this in more detail later, but first, in order to substantiate and expand on these ideas, I will turn to a more detailed examination of a few relevant aspects of Fire Walk with Me, Lost Highway, and Mulholland Drive.
Proto-cinematic episodes
From Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, through Lost Highway, to Mulholland Drive, one can trace certain significant stylistic and narrative continuities in relation to Lynch’s growing concern with explicitly investigating the cinema’s unique affective power. One important feature of this is that Lynch increasingly stages episodes within these films that reenact the revelatory process of cinematic discovery and understanding that he wants his films to offer their spectators. Such scenes include the strange FBI video monitor scene featuring David Bowie as some sort of lost spectral agent, and the dream scene that begins with Laura entering a moving photograph on her bedroom wall in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me; the sinister video images of the camcorder wielding Mystery Man, and the hyper-noir world of Lost Highway’s second half; the entire ‘love story in the city of dreams’ that is Mulholland Drive, especially the crucial Club Silencio sequence. These are variations on a type of sequence that can be found in virtually all of Lynch’s films. In his earlier work, these usually take the form of a theatrical/musical performance, set on some sort of stage with the main character watching in the audience. Examples include the Lady in the Radiator in Eraserhead, the opera sequence in Elephant Man, and Dorothy’s performance of the title song in Blue Velvet, as well as the lip sync performance of Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams”. These scenes function to bring the narrative to a halt in order to give full force to the cinema’s capacity to create viscerally affecting moods and emotionally revealing moments through the combination of sound, music, image and acting. These episodes always introduce or reveal something crucial to the character that watches them, initiate some emotionally potent but intangible realization that will change his/her outlook from that point on. As spectators of the film Lynch wants our response to mirror the reaction of the spectator-character within the film. We are also powerfully affected and come to some sort of intangible realization, not only through our experience of the theatrical/musical performance, but also through witnessing the character’s unsettled response to that performance. In this way, these episodes function as distillations of the power Lynch sees in cinematic image: namely, the power to reveal intangible, emotional/affective truths through immediate, visceral experience of the moment.
In these earlier films it is always a private revelation that the character experiences. In Eraserhead the Lady in the Radiator is Henry’s private fantasy of escape; in Elephant Man being at the theatre for the first time is a private thrill for John Merrick, since no one else can understand how much it means to him; in Blue Velvet, seeing Dorothy’s performance awakens a new kind of desire within Jeffrey which he can’t admit to anyone else, and Ben’s “In Dreams” performance is moving to Frank in some strange way no one understands, which is in turn terrifying to Jeffrey in some way no one else seems to recognize. When this type of theatrical/musical scene re-appears in his later work, Lynch alters them in significant ways. This is particularly true in Fire Walk with Me and Mulholland Drive, where the episodes become not private revelations for one character, but shared realizations that occur between two characters.
In Fire Walk with Me this occurs when Laura goes to the Roadhouse bar and sees the performance by the Blue Lady (Julee Cruise). At first this scene functions in a similar way to the above examples, Laura is privately moved to tears to tears by the ethereal performance, which seems to be speaking directly to her tragic fate. But then Donna appears, having followed Laura there. Donna sees how the performance is affecting her best friend and this brings her to tears as well. Then, when Laura sees that her despair has been exposed to Donna, this initiates a moving scene of one-upmanship between the two friends in which Donna insists on trying to accompany Laura on her self-destructive path. In Mulholland Drive the corresponding scene is, of course, the Club Silencio sequence. In this scene the momentary bliss achieved between Betty and ‘Rita’ collapses as they are moved to tears and convulsions by the strangely powerful Spanish a capella lip sync performance of Roy Orbison’s(!) “Crying,” which somehow reveals to them that like the performance, which is “just a tape recording,” their relationship is “not real, it’s all an illusion.” These two scenes differ from their predecessors in that they make explicit that the type of specifically cinematic meaning that is exemplified in theses episodes must be take place between people, as the result of some shared recognition or understanding. We can now start to see what Nochimson was really getting at when she spoke of Lynch’s belief in “empathetic relationship to art”. In the earlier scenes this was implied through the way the scenes functioned for the spectator of the film: we were affected largely through witnessing the way the spectator-character was affected by the performance. In these later examples this crucial aspect of shared recognition is dramatized within the scenes itself. And as spectators, our experience is further enriched by our recognition of the understanding that is passing between characters onscreen.
Lost Highway also contains an interesting variation on the previous form of theatrical/musical performance sequence. In this case, the main character is not a spectator in the audience but a performer on stage. Jazz musician Fred Madison is playing saxophone in a club when he sees his wife Renee in the audience, leaving with another man. This contributes to the suspicions and mistrust that escalate to the level of murderous rage. Interestingly, this scene, which is framed as a memory, is presented in silence; we don’t hear the music Fred is playing. We could see this scene as functioning as an inversion of the musical/performance episodes in Fire Walk with Me and Mulholland Drive in that it portrays not some shared recognition between characters but their total incapacity to communicate or understand each other (although for the viewer, the sequence itself communicates this void between them beautifully).
These sequences, in all of their manifestations, also speak to the importance of music and sound in Lynch’s concept of a cinematic ‘Real.’ In each of the sequences discussed above, it is the music (or lack thereof in Lost Highway) that carries the emotional and affective force and which opens up a new understanding in the spectator-characters and in the viewers. As the Club Silencio scene makes explicit, it is the music itself, not necessarily even the lyrics, which generates the bulk of meaning in these scenes.
It is important to note that in the above cases these episodes are staged as purely theatrical or musical performances, and never explicitly reference the cinema itself, though their power for the viewer clearly derives from the way the event of the performance is cinematically expressed, not simply from the performance alone. Lynch seems to want to avoid any directly self-conscious or self-reflexive depiction of the cinema, most likely because these are moments when he wants the audience to be fully invested the cinematic image, not self-consciously critical of its’ mechanics or aesthetics (Lynch does allow room for a certain critical distance at other times, most notably in the absurd comic grotesque moments that reoccur throughout his work). One of the things that starts to change with Fire Walk with Me, Lost Highway, and Mulholland Drive is that Lynch begins to experiment with ways of creating these proto-cinematic episodes so that they involve elements which link them more directly to the cinema. The presence of some kind of disembodying technological device often plays an important role; video cameras, TV monitors, tape recorders, telephones, answering machines, and radios appear frequently in Fire Walk with Me, Lost Highway, and Mulholland Drive. However, the actual act of filmmaking is still absent (even for the most part in Mulholland Drive where filmmaking is part of the narrative), thus preserving the potential for the viewer’s full emotional investment and avoiding any distancing effect, whether that of a modernist self-consciousness, as in say Persona, or that of a postmodern self-reflexivity, as in say Adaptation. In this sense, the Club Silencio sequence in Mulholland Drive represents a merging of the typical Lynchian theatrical/musical performance scene and the recent scenes that allude more directly to the cinema through the presence of disembodying technology. I will return to this new type of proto-cinematic episode after examining some other important aspects of Fire Walk with Me, Lost Highway, and Mulholland Drive.
Fantasy/Dream vs. Reality
Most of what has been written on Mulholland Drive resists the interpretation that first section is some kind of dream/fantasy/projection and the second section depicts the ‘real’ events and characters behind the dream/fantasy (as examples of this see Nochimson’s review of Mulholland Drive in Film Quarterly and Philip Lopate’s “Welcome to L.A.” in Film Comment). This resistance seems to come about because critics and commentators sense that this interpretation will not ‘solve’ all of the films mysteries. In many ways this is absolutely correct; no attempt to work out the plot in terms of what is ‘real’ and what is 'fantasy' could ever succeed in discovering what is most important in the film. However, it is curious that no one makes any effort to reconcile this with the fact that in the second part of the film Lynch provides a number of hints and clues that seem to serve no purpose other than to explicitly encourage this dream/fantasy vs. reality interpretation of the narrative. This apparent contradiction seems to me that one of the most significant aspects of Lynch’s method, especially in Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive. (The exception to this critical trend is the previously mentioned piece in Salon.com by Bill Wyman, Max Garrone and Andy Klein, which provides the most thorough and well considered version of the fantasy’ vs. reality interpretation that I have encountered.)
While discussing Lost Highway, which has a similar two-part, fantasy-reality structure as Mulholland Drive, Zizek’s makes the insightful claim that in the film fantasy and reality do not have a horizontal relationship, in which one supports the other, but rather a vertical relationship wherein they exist in parallel, each feeding off and supporting the other (Zizek, 35). We might add that to this that, significantly, in Lost Highway it becomes essentially impossible to definitively designate one side as ‘fantasy’ and one side as ‘reality’. All that can be said is that that there are two separate realms of action, each of which seems to be ontologically distinct from the other, and that the relationship between them is structured along somewhat similar lines as the relationship between reality and fantasy. While Mulholland Drive does seem to indicate which section could be read as ‘dream/fantasy’ and which as ‘reality’, by constructing the narrative backwards (‘fantasy’ first, ‘reality’ second) Lynch makes it nearly impossible to connect all the ‘clues’ of the second part with their manifestations in the first part on a first viewing, largely because the transition between the two sections is so initially disorienting and unexpected. Thus, in both Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive, Lynch confuses the distinction between ‘fantasy/dream’ and ‘reality’ that the film itself appears to set up.
Why would Lynch set up what seem to be ontologically distinct realms and then present them in a way that defies definition or categorization? One effect seems to be to give primacy to the cinematic image over narrative coherence. This certainly doesn’t mean that there is no narrative explanation, but if one tries to reduce everything to the level of narrative meaning one misses an essential feature of Lynch’s work. On the other hand it would be equally mistaken to deny the existence of any narrative logic and to insist that Lynch simply strings together a series of powerful, loosely connected free floating images. A crucial aspect of Lynch’s cinema is clearly the complex dynamic at work between the type of meaning derived from narrative logic and the immediately affecting, visceral experience of the cinematic image, the way the two feed off and merge with and resist each other all at once.
We could say that Lynch acknowledges that the two states ‘fantasy/dream’ and ‘reality’ can be distinguished according to a certain narrative logic, but at the same time he also calls attention to the fact that this division can only take us so far; the most important mysteries will always remain beyond the reach of all narrative explanations. It is not so much that the line between the two states is unclear, rather that the relationship between them is more enigmatic and complex than is usually acknowledged (in films anyway). In the mysterious, uncanny atmosphere that results from this complex relationship between ‘reality’ and ‘fantasy’ Lynch sees the true potential for the kind of meaning that only the cinema can generate. The cinematic image is able to give expression to the mysteries that always remain unaccounted for by the narrative, and the viewer is able to experience and comprehend them in an immediate, visceral way. This is more valuable to Lynch than ‘solving’ a film in a narrative sense. In his own words:
"To me, a mystery is like a magnet. Whenever there is something unknown there is a pull to it […] When you only see a part, it is much stronger than seeing the whole. The whole might have a logic, but out of context the fragment takes on tremendous value of abstraction." (Lynch, 231)
In considering these issues it is illuminating to examine some important general structural features shared by Fire Walk with Me, Lost Highway, and Mulholland Drive.
Binary Structure in Fire Walk with Me, Lost Highway, and Mulholland Drive
Each film has a binary structure, with two clearly distinct narrative sections. In Fire Walk with Me, the first section revolves around two FBI agents investigating the murder of Teresa Banks in the town of Deer Meadow, while the second section tracks the last few weeks in the life of Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks before she is murdered by the same man who killed Teresa (Laura’s father, Leland Palmer). In Lost Highway, the first section centers on the strained relationship between jazz musician Fred Madison and his dark haired wife Renee which escalates until Fred kills Renee, while the second section is about the torrid affair between Pete, whom Fred has mysteriously transformed into, and Alice, a gangster’s moll who looks exactly like Renee, except that she is a blonde. In Mulholland Drive the first section revolves around the growing intimacy between Betty, a perky Hollywood newcomer with ambitions to be a star, and ‘Rita’, a sultry amnesiac car accident victim, as the two search for the latter’s true identity, while the second section deals with the deteriorating relationship between a washed up Hollywood wannabe named Diane, who looks exactly like Betty, and Camilla, a rising starlet who looks exactly like ‘Rita’, which ends when Diane hires a hit man to kill Camilla.
The event at the center of each of these three films is a murder that has been committed because of a doomed sexual relationship. In Fire Walk with Me, this is the killing of Laura Palmer by her own father Leland, who has been sexually abusing her. In Lost Highway, Fred is driven to kill Renee by an increasingly maddening combination of suspicion, sexual humiliation, and resentment. In Mulholland Drive, the jilted, bitter Diane hires a hit man to kill her former lover Camilla, who is now engaged to a man. But in fact, there are actually two crucial murders in each film, the second coming as a direct result of the first. In Lost Highway the second murder is that of Dick Laurent, a gangster with whom Renee used to be, or still is, involved. In Mulholland Drive the second killing is a suicide rather than a murder, and occurs when Diane shoots herself, unable to live with what she has done to Camilla. In Fire Walk with Me the murder of Laura Palmer is technically the second murder, though it is primary in terms of narrative importance. The murder of Teresa Banks precedes it chronologically, but this still fits the pattern we have identified since this murder is still a consequence of the doomed sexual relationship that ultimately results in Laura’s death (Leland kills Teresa after realizing that she knows Laura and is involved in prostitution with her).
In all three films, despite how the literal chronology of the narrative functions, there is a sense that both murders have already taken place at the start of the film. In Fire Walk with Me, Teresa Banks is killed in the very first scene, and of course most viewers presumably already know that Laura Palmer will be killed at the end of the film because of the TV series, (and if they were unfamiliar with the series they would know from the advertising of the film, which promised to reveal the last days of Laura Palmer). Lost Highway, with its looping mobius strip structure, literally begins and ends with the same two events, both of which are directly connected to Renee’s murder. These are: the announcement on the intercom that “Dick Laurent is dead,” which is first received and then delivered by Fred, and a car speeding down a highway at night, accompanied by David Bowies ‘I am Deranged’. And in Mulholland Drive, the first thing we see after the jitterbug sequence, is a p.o.v. shot of someone, breathing in a manner that suggests distress, falling back into bed. At the end of the film we will realize that these are probably the final moments before Diane kills herself. And although we see ‘Rita’ narrowly escape being killed by hit men in the first full scene of the film, we later find out that her counterpart in the second section, Camilla, is killed by a hit man hired by Diane. Thus, in all three films the two crucial killings are in some way contained in the very beginning of the film, suggesting some alternate chronology of events to the one we are given on screen and freeing us from the usual constraints of linear narrative logic.
In both Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive the two-part structure functions in a similar way. One part depicts the events leading up to the central murder (the first part in Lost Highway, the second part in Mulholland Drive). The other part can be seen as an attempt to restage or re-imagine the basic circumstances that led to the murder in hopes that this will lead to a different ending. This attempt to take back the murder ultimately fails, revealing in a new light the motives behind the murder. The structure of Fire Walk with Me works in a slightly different way. From this perspective the film’s relationship with the TV series is crucial. In a sense, the investigation of Laura’s murder, which provided the spine of the series, was a continuous attempt to re-imagine and restage the circumstances of the murder, as well as a continuous refusal or inability to acknowledge the true circumstances of the murder (the abusive incestuous relationship between Laura and her father). Fire Walk with Me can be seen as an attempt to re-imagine the world of the series in a new way (this is the main purpose of the first part of the film, which is set in the anti-Twin Peaks town of Deer Valley) which ultimately comes to the same conclusion, thus, again, revealing in a new light the circumstances and motives behind the central murder.
What we can conclude from these structural similarities is that in all of these films the murders and the motivations behind them---which is to say the emotions behind them--- form the core of truth around which the rest of the action revolves. In Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive we could even say that the murders are the only events that we can be certain definitely occurred. In this way, we can see how for Lynch the emotional/affective circumstances surrounding the murders effectively constitute the ‘Real’ in the films. If we are to say we understand either of these films, this must mean that we have grasped the affective/emotional logic behind the events of the murders, not necessarily the literal circumstances of their occurrence. In other words, we understand the affective/emotional causes and consequences, which do not always translate into the kind of rational cause and effect logic that is usually used to structure a narrative.
For Lynch, one of the great powers of the cinema is its capacity to uncover and reveal this emotional/affective logic, which otherwise appears irrational and incomprehensible. This same seemingly irrational logic may be similar to that which governs unconscious subjective states, and this accounts for the ‘dreamlike’ atmosphere of Lynch’s films as well as for the frequency with which scenes of dreams, fantasies and memories appear within the films. However, to insist, as Nochimson does, that Lynch’s whole body of work is founded on some notion of the “liberating power of subconscious energies”(Nochimson, ) is to miss the point. Lynch is not trying to recreate these subjective subconscious states or even to represent them accurately. He is aware that the cinema differs from them in a number of crucial ways and moreover that it is precisely from these differences that the cinema derives its true power. Cinematic meaning is not a totally subjective, isolated (and isolating) experience, as is dreaming, fantasizing, remembering, etc. Rather, as we have already seen, for Lynch cinematic meaning is a shared experience, generated between people. And we don’t need Nochimson’s appeal to some quasi-Jungian notion of the collective unconscious to explain this. Whether this ‘empathetic’ relationship takes place between individual audience members, between filmmaker and audience, or between performer and audience, the important thing is that a film is a concrete phenomenon and exists in the world, not just in the mind of a single person. The cinema is able to give palpable expression to the internal, irrational logic of emotional/affective states, and thus enables us to communicate them in way that would otherwise be impossible. We can perhaps see more clearly now the significance of the FBI security camera scene in Fire Walk with Me and with the mysterious videotapes in Lost Highway: both speak to the capacity of the cinematic image to express, give external form to, what would otherwise remain a subjective, seemingly irrational logic.
The reason that the cinematic image is capable of this is that somehow, despite the overwhelming predominance given to narrative in the cinema, it has developed into a form that allows what should appear as great gaps in narrative logic to be accepted as making some kind of sense beyond rational narrative logic. Here we can start to see the role of cinematic references and allusions in Lynch’s later work, particularly Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive. Lynch’s main points of references in these films are Hollywood films that feature some strange, irrational logic. This is most pronounced in the second part of Lost Highway, which is structured around numerous references to Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly, one of the most unusual ‘film noirs’ of the 1950’s. Aldrich’s film brought into the open and exploded (literally) all of the irrational, paranoid, nihilistic, sadistic, apocalyptic undercurrents that remained just below the surface of most ‘noirs’. Similarly, Mulholland Drive features numerous illusions to Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (including the very title of the film). Narrated by a corpse we see floating in a pool in the very first scene and featuring a hauntingly disorienting sense of time, Wilder’s film tells the story of how Hollywood sucked the life out of a failed screenwriter and a few others. As we have already noted, what Lynch is alluding to in these films is not their place within the cinematic cannon, nor their stylistic surfaces. It is not even the story or theme of Aldrich’s and Wilder’s films that is most important to Lynch (though they are certainly relevant). Rather, what is crucial about these films for Lynch is the way that they explicitly allow a seemingly irrational emotional/affective logic to clash with, and at times overtake, a more conventional narrative rationality. These films thus become prime instances of what I have called a specifically cinematic ‘real’ in Lynch’s work, a unique conception of the way that cinema generates meaning.
We can now see that the function of this binary ‘reality’/’fantasy’ structure in Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive is not simply some convenient or clever narrative device, nor is meant it to reveal anything precise about the actual relationship between reality and fantasy as it functions in everyday life (which is why readings Lynch that rely on Freudian or Lacanian theories can never really be satisfying). Rather Lynch stages these realms as distinct, even opposed, in order to enable himself to fully explore the cinema’s potential to create a type of experience for the viewer that crosses between and overlaps the experiences of ‘reality’ and ‘fantasy’ that we are used to. For Lynch cinematic meaning conflates the subjective phantasmagoric truths that we imaginatively invent in our dreams and fantasies with the literal, quotidian, shared truths that constitute our sense of everyday reality.
Multiple Realms in Fire Walk with Me, Lost Highway, and Mulholland Drive
All three films feature different realms that clearly have a distinct ontological status from each other. As we have already discussed, in Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive, the two narrative sections clearly belong to two ontologically distinct realms that seem to have something to do with the relationship between ‘fantasy’, ‘dream’ and ‘reality’, and yet cannot ever quite be definitively defined by these terms. Characters and situations from one section reappear transformed or altered in some way in the other section. However, in both films there are also characters that exist in the same form in both sections and that seem to have some understanding of the relationship between the two realms: the Mystery Man in Lost Highway, and the elderly couple and the person behind the dumpster in Mulholland Drive are the clearest examples. The existence of these characters seems to speak to the existence of yet another realm that appears to oversee the other two and move between them. In Fire Walk with Me, on a literal level the two narrative sections both appear to have the same ontological status and are distinct from each other only by the time and place of their setting, though as both Chion and Nochimson point out on a thematic level the town of Deer Valley functions “like a black hole somewhere in the universe, it is the absolute negation of Twin Peaks [of the TV series], an anti-Twin Peaks”(Chion, 148). However, there exists in Fire Walk with Me too an ontologically distinct realm that links the two narrative sections. This corresponds to the overseeing realms in Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive but is even more developed and intricate than in those films. This is the realm is where we find the Red Room and its host the Man from another place, as well as a number of characters, including Mike the one-armed man, Bob, and the Old Woman and the Masked Boy. And of course, there is FBI agent Dale Cooper, who is unique in that he is clearly situated within the realm of the basic narrative---he is investigating the murder of Teresa Banks and will, we know, be investigating the murder of Laura Palmer--- but he has access to the more elusive other realm as well (no other characters move in this direction).
It would take a detailed analysis of each of the films to work out the precise role of these individual characters within their respective films (and they are a varied bunch, some good, some evil, some benign, some indifferent, etc.). However, from the above comparison of these three films we can make some useful general remarks concerning the meaning of these characters in relation to the issues we have been discussing. The function of these strange characters that populate a mysterious overseeing realm in Lynch’s work is clearly not to signify Lynch’s belief in some literal hidden dimension, nor is it to represent some aspect of a character’s psyche or some abstract force (such as ‘evil’). Their true function is to dramatize the way cinema can move between and participate in seemingly distinct realms of existence (such as fantasy and reality) without ever quite belonging to either one. These characters provide a sort of cinematic consciousness that belongs to the film itself apart from any single character. Like the Mystery Man in Lost Highway who is simultaneously here and there, inside and outside, real and imagined, for Lynch the cinematic image always inhabits a space in between ‘fantasy’ and ‘reality’, never entirely one or the other (and never simply mixture of the two either), never exclusively inside a single subjectivity and never outside subjectivity altogether either.
Transitions
It is important that the transition between the two sections in each of these three films features an example of the new type of proto-cinematic episode that we touched on before, involving more direct references to the cinema. In Fire Walk with Me this is the strange scene in which agent Cooper comes in comes into the FBI office and insists on acting out a dream he had. He proceeds to stand in the hallway positioned under a security camera and then rushes in to the security room around the corner to check the monitor. He does this three times and the third time he checks the monitor he sees that his image has remained frozen on screen in monitor, so that he appears to simultaneously still be in the hallway and be in the security room looking at the monitor. Then, a man emerges from an elevator at the end of the hall and walks past Cooper‘s image into the main office. Cooper leaves the security room and rushes into the office where he is told that the man is an agent named Phillip Jeffries who has been missing for sometime. Jeffries then begins to utter a string of frantic, confused, disconnected utterances about someone named Judy and a room above a garage, as we get a frenetic montage featuring characters (including the Man from another place, Mike, and Bob) in eerily effected shots (reverse audio and image, superimpositions, slow motion, etc…). When this montage ends, Jeffries has vanished and Cooper and the others are told that by the front desk that he was never there. But when they check the security tape, sure enough it shows Jeffries coming down the hall past Cooper’s frozen image.
In Lost Highway the transitional proto-cinematic episode is a culmination of a series of scenes in which Fred and Renee have received mysterious videotapes that show up on their doorstep. The first showed a couple grainy black and white shots of the outside of their house. The second began the same but then cut to an even grainier shot moving through the hallways inside of the house, a shot which we had previously scene as Fred’s p.o.v. in his dream about looking for Renee. The third tape, which Fred watches alone, has the same two shots as the previous tape, but adds an even grainier shot which continues into the bedroom where Fred sees himself, knife in hand, standing over Renee’s bloody corpse. From this point the film cuts to Fred already in police custody for the murder.
In Mulholland Drive there are two such transitional scenes. The first is Betty’s audition scene, in which she transforms a clichéd, soap opera caliber script into a distressingly seductive, emotionally potent, and genuinely powerful performance which provides a glimpse of the pain and desperation that will consume her when she becomes Diane in the second part of the film. This scene is unique among the other proto-cinematic episodes in that it concerns itself not with the way the combination of sound, music, image and performance can generate cinematic meaning, but rather provides proof that this can be achieved solely through the unsettling, irrational, seemingly miraculous power of acting in the cinema to express otherwise indescribable emotional/affective states. (Note, this is still something acting can achieve only in the cinema, not on stage: the fact Betty’s audition scene is played almost entirely in one unbroken close up greatly contributes to the unexpected power of the scene.) The other transitional episode main in Mulholland Drive is the Club Silencio scene, already discusses above, in which the revelation of the disembodying technology behind the powerfully affecting illusion of the heart-wrenching performance effectively undermines and destroys the illusion of stability and bliss that seems to exist between the two women.
In fact, when we look closely at the films, we see that almost without fail, every time elements from one realm seep into and destabilize the other, every time the mysterious overseeing realm disrupt the narrative, Lynch communicates this through the use of some special cinematic technique such as slow motion, reverse motion, strobe lighting, superimpositions, distorted images, overtly stylized use of sound or music, etc. These occur moments occur too frequently throughout the films to make a full list, but examples would include the following.
In Fire Walk with Me:
-the ‘reverse’ sound and motion in the Red room
-the scenes in which the old woman and the masked boy materialize from nowhere and then dissolve into thin air
-the slow motion, drone of the ceiling fan outside Laura’s bedroom, which we see whenever her father has sex with her
-the unusual sound mix in the traffic jam scene in which the one armed man confronts Laura and Leland
In Lost Highway:
-the Mystery Man’s face appearing to Fred superimposed over Renee’s face following their failed lovemaking and his dream about killing her
-the backward exploding beach house in that appears to Fred in prison before he transforms into Pete
-the flickering slow motion shot of Alice accompanied by Lou Reed’s “Magic Moment” that occurs the first time Pete sees her (which is also the first time we see her) as Alice the blonde
-the unmotivated strobe lighting and lens distortions that occur first as Pete is wanders down the halls of Andy’s house looking for Alice, then later as Fred walks through the halls of the Lost Highway Motel searching for Renee
In Mulholland Drive:
-the scene at the film studio in which Betty and Adam exchange a long, meaningful, slow motion gaze accompanied by the 50’s song
-the superimpositions that multiplying the images Betty and ‘Rita’ so that they fan out overtop of each other, which occur right after they find Diane Selwyn’s corpse
-the numerous strobe and fog effects, as well as the physically impossible appearances and disappearances that occur in the Club Silencio sequence
-miniaturization of the elderly couple and the strobe and smoke effects that occur as the two of them chase Diane into the bedroom and drive her to shoot herself
Lynch is routinely accused of self-indulgence for his repeated use of such stylistic flourishes, which many see as being empty, self-indulgent exercises in an MTV-inspired style (as examples of this, see Stephanie Zacherek’s review of “Lost Highway” in Salon.com, or the Ebert review quoted at the beginning of this essay). However, we should now be able to see that, on the contrary, these devices are an integral part of Lynch’s complex concept of how cinematic meaning is generated. Discussing the ceiling fan in Fire Walk with Me, Chion says that such elements in Lynch’s work should not be taken symbolically, “nor can reduced to some primary function. They are life itself, vital power, absurd, ever-present”(Chion, 151). We could add that for Lynch these stylistic devices create space for a kind of specifically cinematic perception, that they grasp “life itself” in specifically a cinematic way. These effects create moments in which the normal boundaries of time, space and identity become less rigid, in which the lines dividing past and present, memory and fantasy, dream and reality become blurred and we are momentarily freed from a rational, cause and effect logic. These moments enable us to perceive events in their totality somehow, cause and effect, intention and consequence, hope and regret, desire and resentment, all rolled into one inextricably tangled web and experienced viscerally in a sustained flurry of sound, image, music, and performance. In this sense, Nochimson is correct in her insistence that Lynch wants to free us from the limiting perspective of rational order, but her claim that he is trying to open us up to the “liberating powers of the subconscious” is misleading. It would be more accurate to say that he is trying to open us up to the liberating powers of the cinema.
Conclusion
I have tried to draw attention to some of the prominent features of Lynch’s increasingly explicit exploration of how meaning is generated in the cinema. In examining certain relevant aspects of Fire Walk with Me, Lost Highway, and Mulholland Drive, I have attempted to show that for Lynch the cinematic ‘Real’ is a realm where fantasy and reality both fall apart as masks of the other. In this chaotic realm---which is neither the realm of the subconscious dream world, nor the realm of postmodern ambivalence--- emotion and affect are cut loose from any rational narrative cause and effect structure, and Lynch offers the viewer an immediate, visceral, sensual experience that touches on an aspect of the ‘Real’ which would otherwise remain inaccessible. I have concentrated on this aspect of Lynch’s work, because I feel it is necessary to try to understand how meaning is generated within the films themselves before trying to impose some external theoretical framework of the film. This is particularly important in the case of a filmmaker like Lynch, for whom the unique nature cinematic meaning is clearly an explicit concern. To be sure, Lynch’s work is rich in issues and themes that benefit from being examined from a broad range of critical and theoretical perspectives (sexuality, authenticity, identity, consciousness, violence, etc.), and it is not surprising that this approach has been predominant in most serious studies of Lynch’s work. I have admittedly had to ignore a number of these issues in concentrating on how Lynch conceives of the cinematic image. However, the role of these other issues in Lynch’s work will ultimately benefit from a more precise examination of the way Lynch himself defines the cinema within his own films.
Notes
[1] Throughout this essay I will use the term ‘cinematic image’ as a general way to refer to the all forms moving image/sound combinations (the emphasis on the role of sound in Lynch’s cinema can hardly be overstated)---including television, video, and film---as Lynch makes no a prior distinctions between the way these mediums function.
Works Cited
Chion, Michel. David Lynch. Trans. Robert Julien. British Film Institute, London. 1995.
Ebert, Roger “Lost Highway” http://www.suntimes.com/ebert/ebert_reviews/1997/02/022704.html
Holden, Stephen “Mulholland Drive: Hollywood Seen as a Fun House Fantasy” http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/06/movies/06DRIV.html?ex=1083384000&en=c47e474ea66d26d9&ei=5070
Lopate, Phillip “Welcome to L.A.” Film Comment Sept/Oct 2001 (vol. 37, #5)
Lynch, David Lynch on Lynch. ed. by Chris Rodley. Faber and Faber Limited, London. 1997.
Nochimson, Martha P. “Mulholland Drive” Film Quarterly Fall 2002 (vol. 56, #1)
Nochimpson, Martha P. The Passion of David Lynch: Wild At Heart in Hollywood. University of Texas Press, Austin. 1997.
Wyman, Bill “Everything you wanted to know about "Mulholland Drive"with Max Garrone and Andy Klein. http://archive.salon.com/ent/movies/feature/2001/10/23/mulholland_drive_analysis/
Zacherek, Sephanie “Lost Highway” http://dir.salon.com/feb97/highway970228.html
Zizek, Slavoj The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch’s Lost Highway. The University Of Washington Press, Seattle. 2000.
What does a Gap commercial have to do with Mulholland Drive?
Mulholland Drive, David Lynch’s most recent, and most popularly acclaimed, film opens with a montage that multiplies the image of young couples dancing the jitterbug against a solid purple backdrop. This sequence is clearly modeled on a series of Gap ads that featured attractive young couples swing dancing against brightly colored monochrome backdrops and which were all over the airwaves around the time Lynch originally shot Mulholland Drive as a TV pilot in 1998. It may strike us as odd that the director of Eraserhead (1979), whose name can hardly appear in print without adjectives like ‘cult’ ‘weird’, ‘bizarre’, ‘surreal’, and ‘disturbing’, would start a film with a reference to a Gap commercial. And yet the sequence is in many ways in keeping with Lynch’s other work. In the sequence, the excessively inflated, artificial exuberance of the commercials is pushed to its extreme so that, as the up-tempo swing music escalates and brightly lit shots of an impossibly happy young woman accompanied by an eerily grinning elderly couple begin to flicker on and off the screen, the atmosphere crosses over from energetic and fun to discomforting, even menacing. It is as if the sequence cannot sustain the counterfeit sense of joy that it is trying to convey and cannot manage to conceal the uneasiness and desperation that are lurking just beneath the surface of the image. Since as far back as Blue Velvet (1986) Lynch has relished in staging iconic or clichéd images of American culture and then revealing the disturbing resonances of what they are concealing. In this sense, the jitterbug sequence just enacts in a condensed form a complex ambivalence at the heart of Lynch’s aesthetic: the way the cinematic image[1] can create a moments of startling power and irresistible appeal while at the same time revealing itself as an illusion, an artifice concealing something disturbing that we don’t want to acknowledge.
However, the sequence also points to a relatively new aspect of Lynch’s cinema. In Blue Velvet or the Twin Peaks television series, the iconic or clichéd images that Lynch subverts seem culled from some sense of collective cultural consciousness and are not explicitly related to the cinematic image. Even the multiple references to The Wizard of Oz around which Wild at Heart (1990) is structured seem rooted in Oz’s mythological status within popular cultural more than in how it functions specifically as a work of cinema. However, starting with Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992) and Lost Highway (1997), and culminating in Mulholland Drive (2001), which is set in Hollywood and introduces the filmmaking process into the narrative itself, there seems to be an increasing desire or willingness on Lynch’s part to openly reflect on the process by which cinematic meaning is made and the implications this has for the role of the cinematic image within our culture, as well the consequences it has for Lynch’s own cinematic practices. This recent focus of Lynch’s work has received almost no attention from critics and commentators. This may be understandable to a certain degree considering that it’s most explicit manifestation was in the latest film; before the release of Mulholland Drive it may have been difficult to perceive any significant links between Fire Walk with Me, which was considered an aberration by most at the time of its release, and Lost Highway, which seemed to indicate something of a new direction for Lynch. Compounding this problem is the fact that both of the major books on Lynch, Michel Chion’s David Lynch and Martha P. Nochimson’s The Passion of David Lynch, were written before the release of Lost Highway (both books do have codas briefly discussing the film, though Chion’s is only available in an untranslated 1997 French edition). However, aside from matters of timing, this is also indicative of an unfortunate trend that has developed in the critical community concerning Lynch. There is a persistent reluctance to enter into a serious, in-depth examination of Lynch’s work; with a few exceptions--- including the works by Michel Chion and Martha P. Nochimson, as well as Slavoj Zizek’s study of Lost Highway, which I will discuss below--- the predominant attitude seems to be that whatever Lynch is up to, you are free to love it or hate it but there is no use trying too hard to figure it out. Now, a reluctance to over-rationalize or definitively interpret every aspect of Lynch’s films is of course understandable and appropriate. However, this is quite different from the refusal to engage in any detailed analysis that we encounter in most of what is written about Lynch. Whether he is being lauded as innovated and daring (Stephen Holden on Mulholland Drive: “By surrendering any semblance of rationality to create a post-Freudian, pulp-fiction fever dream of a movie, Mr. Lynch ends up shooting the moon”) or maligned as self-indulgent, even immoral (Roger Ebert on Lost Highway: “it really is all an empty stylistic facade. This movie is about design, not cinema… I felt jerked around.”), critics rarely make much effort to support their opinions with a carefully considered reading of the films. (It is not surprising that of all the writings on Mulholland Drive that I have encountered, only one article written by Bill Wyman, Max Garrone and Andy Klein for Salon.com even mentions the resemblance of the jitterbug sequence to the Gap ads.) I will try to investigate the unique nature of Lynch’s increasing interest in explicitly exploring the function of the cinematic image, through a close examination of certain prevalent aspects of Fire Walk with Me, Lost Highway, and Mulholland Drive. This will bring us face to face with a number of interrelated issues at the heart of Lynch’s cinema, including the question of authenticity, or the ‘Real’, the role of emotion/affect, and Lynch’s relationship to postmodernism.
Lynch, Postmodernism, and the ‘Real’
The new directness that characterizes Lynch’s recent explorations of how the cinematic image generates meaning materializes in a few basic ways basic ways. One of the most noticeable of these is an increasing number of explicit allusions, references, and quotations of other films, especially in Lost Highway, with its multiple references to, among other things, Maya Deren’s Meshes in the Afternoon and to Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly, and Mulholland Drive which also features a multiple references, including nods to Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard and Ingmar Berman’s Persona, as well as numerous allusions to Lynch’s own previous films. I will discuss how this functions in more detail later, but first a few preliminary remarks are in order. The first thing that needs to be addressed is the fact that Lynch’s use of reference and quotation does not seem to fit comfortably within any of the theoretical frameworks that are usually used to discuss these techniques. This may be why these aspects of his recent films have been overlooked.
As Zizek notes at the beginning of The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime, it is relatively common for theorists and critics to refer to David Lynch in passing as a postmodern filmmaker (Zizek, 3). In a way this is not surprising. Lynch’s films contain a self-conscious mixture of ‘high art’ and ‘popular culture’ and an abundance of references to other films, and seem to emphasize dazzling stylistic surfaces over narrative coherence. All of this does situate his work within a host of postmodern issues. In Zizek’s words, “the enigma of the coincidence of opposites” that one finds in Lynch’s work “is in many ways the enigma of postmodernity itself”(3). However, when one examines Lynch’s films closely, his relationship to postmodernism becomes more problematic, as most of the substantial studies of his work acknowledge, implicitly or explicitly (neither Chion, nor Nochimson, nor Zizek suggest that reading Lynch’s work in relationship to postmodernism is a useful approach). For instance, Lynch’s cinematic references and quotations seem to operate quite differently from the way postmodernism conceives of theses devices. Postmodernism claims that the ‘Real’ is inaccessible and cannot be directly represented and thus sees the film and television image as inevitably separated from the ‘Real’ by an infinite layers of representational forms. Thus, the important consideration is to gauge the effects of representation and to deploy the strategies of representation that are most desirable in any given case (the nature of this desirability depending on the aims of the artist…). It is to this end that postmodernism embraces devices such as inter-textual references, the mixing of heterogeneous stylistic forms (pastiche) and the subversion of conventional narrative modes. Lynch’s reference are taken from a broad range of cinematic genres and periods-- from early experimental cinema to television commercials to European art films to classical Hollywood--- but the effect of these is markedly different from what is usually considered a postmodern pastiche. Unlike, say, Todd Haynes’ use of Sirkian melodrama in Far from Heaven, Lynch’s allusions do not function as references to specific, fixed cinematic codes that he wishes to speak through, or to speak of. Nor do Lynch’s allusions function as mosaics or pastiches of cinematic surfaces in the same way as do the quotation-packed films of Guy Maddin or Quentin Tarantino (two otherwise dissimilar postmodern filmmakers). Nor, on the other hand, do Lynch’s references function in the more modernist sense as attempts to self-consciously link him up fraternally to a recognized tradition or history of the cinema---his allusions are far too idiosyncratic and eclectic for that (after all what cinematic trajectory could possibly include both Maya Deren and a Gap commercial?). In fact, when Lynch references Sunset Boulevard in Mulholland Drive, his aim does not even seem to be to make his film look or feel like Wilder’s in any recognizable way.
So we must ask ourselves: what is Lynch’s relationship to the films that he references, and how is it fundamentally different from what is usually considered a postmodern perspective? One of the main differences is that Lynch does not seem to consider cinematic styles and genres as fixed modes of representation that construct various notions of a ‘Real’ to which we can never have direct immediate access. How then does the notion of the ‘Real’ function in Lynch’s work? As I will try to illustrate, for Lynch, the cinematic image is capable of achieving a specifically cinematic ‘Real’; that is to say that for Lynch the cinema is capable of generating meaning in a way that connects us with an aspect of the ‘Real’ in a more direct and immediate way than is possible in everyday experience. (This is only an aspect of the ‘Real,’ which can still never be wholly divulged, but this position is quite different from the postmodern notion that the ‘Real’ is inaccessible in any direct way at all, and that representation ultimately speaks only of itself.) Lynch’s allusions and quotations all function to reveal the nature of his concept of the cinematic ‘Real’ through instances of its presence in other films. What is essential about this notion of a cinematic ‘Real’ is that the cinematic image does not attempt to represent the ‘Real’ (as both modernism and postmodernism claim), rather it creates a visceral affecting experience for the spectator which opens up access to the ‘Real’ in a unique and powerful way; the ‘Real’ is accessed not through the act of representation, but through the experience of mediation.
In this sense, Nochimson is correct when she says of Lynch, "His belief in the image as a possible bridge to the real does not depend on any abstract framework, rather on a visceral sense of the essential truth of an empathetic[…] relationship with art." (Nochimson, 9). However, for Nochimson, this “bridge to the real” has to do with allowing “the finer aspects of our subconscious energies” to “conform us to the life-affirming energies of nature”(10). However, attempting to fit Lynch’s aesthetic into this sort of questionable psycho-cosmological system is unnecessary and only further obscures what is actually going on in his films. This is true of any attempt to bring Lynch’s work in line with some preexisting theory or system of ideas. This is not to say that one shouldn’t ever examine the relationship between Lynch’s films and these types of theoretical frameworks, but first one must try to account for the way in which cinematic meaning is generated and defined within films themselves--- especially since this is has become such an explicit aspect of his recent work. Despite this however, Nochimson’s idea about an empathetic relationship to art in Lynch’s work do seem to me to indicate a valuable approach, and I will return to this idea later.
On the opposite spectrum, Zizek rejects the “New Age” reading of Lynch (Zizek, 22), of which he finds Nochimson’s book “exemplary”, and instead attempts a Lacanian reading of Lynch. Essentially, Zizek sees Lynch’s films as attempts to bring the spectator to a confrontation with “the comic horror of the fundamental fantasy”---the Lacanian ‘Real-impossible’ which can never be directly accessed, the unnamable trauma or objectless desire that is not grounded in reality and always eludes representation through being staged directly as fantasy (Zizek, 43-44). Regardless of the legitimacy of his Lacanian interpretation (on which I am not qualified to comment), Zizek does touch upon what seems to me an important aspect of Lynch’s cinema. When we examine Lynch’s recent work closely, I think that we will find that ultimately for Lynch affect and emotion--- and the point at which they become indistinguishable--- are at the core of the cinematic ‘Real’ and that the road to this ‘Real’ is desire. Zizek’s comments fit well with my belief that in Lynch’s work an understanding of the cinema emerges which defines itself as a powerful force that enables viewers to viscerally experience affect and emotion in unique way that is detached from any rational, narrative cause and effect structure. I will get into the implications of this in more detail later, but first, in order to substantiate and expand on these ideas, I will turn to a more detailed examination of a few relevant aspects of Fire Walk with Me, Lost Highway, and Mulholland Drive.
Proto-cinematic episodes
From Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, through Lost Highway, to Mulholland Drive, one can trace certain significant stylistic and narrative continuities in relation to Lynch’s growing concern with explicitly investigating the cinema’s unique affective power. One important feature of this is that Lynch increasingly stages episodes within these films that reenact the revelatory process of cinematic discovery and understanding that he wants his films to offer their spectators. Such scenes include the strange FBI video monitor scene featuring David Bowie as some sort of lost spectral agent, and the dream scene that begins with Laura entering a moving photograph on her bedroom wall in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me; the sinister video images of the camcorder wielding Mystery Man, and the hyper-noir world of Lost Highway’s second half; the entire ‘love story in the city of dreams’ that is Mulholland Drive, especially the crucial Club Silencio sequence. These are variations on a type of sequence that can be found in virtually all of Lynch’s films. In his earlier work, these usually take the form of a theatrical/musical performance, set on some sort of stage with the main character watching in the audience. Examples include the Lady in the Radiator in Eraserhead, the opera sequence in Elephant Man, and Dorothy’s performance of the title song in Blue Velvet, as well as the lip sync performance of Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams”. These scenes function to bring the narrative to a halt in order to give full force to the cinema’s capacity to create viscerally affecting moods and emotionally revealing moments through the combination of sound, music, image and acting. These episodes always introduce or reveal something crucial to the character that watches them, initiate some emotionally potent but intangible realization that will change his/her outlook from that point on. As spectators of the film Lynch wants our response to mirror the reaction of the spectator-character within the film. We are also powerfully affected and come to some sort of intangible realization, not only through our experience of the theatrical/musical performance, but also through witnessing the character’s unsettled response to that performance. In this way, these episodes function as distillations of the power Lynch sees in cinematic image: namely, the power to reveal intangible, emotional/affective truths through immediate, visceral experience of the moment.
In these earlier films it is always a private revelation that the character experiences. In Eraserhead the Lady in the Radiator is Henry’s private fantasy of escape; in Elephant Man being at the theatre for the first time is a private thrill for John Merrick, since no one else can understand how much it means to him; in Blue Velvet, seeing Dorothy’s performance awakens a new kind of desire within Jeffrey which he can’t admit to anyone else, and Ben’s “In Dreams” performance is moving to Frank in some strange way no one understands, which is in turn terrifying to Jeffrey in some way no one else seems to recognize. When this type of theatrical/musical scene re-appears in his later work, Lynch alters them in significant ways. This is particularly true in Fire Walk with Me and Mulholland Drive, where the episodes become not private revelations for one character, but shared realizations that occur between two characters.
In Fire Walk with Me this occurs when Laura goes to the Roadhouse bar and sees the performance by the Blue Lady (Julee Cruise). At first this scene functions in a similar way to the above examples, Laura is privately moved to tears to tears by the ethereal performance, which seems to be speaking directly to her tragic fate. But then Donna appears, having followed Laura there. Donna sees how the performance is affecting her best friend and this brings her to tears as well. Then, when Laura sees that her despair has been exposed to Donna, this initiates a moving scene of one-upmanship between the two friends in which Donna insists on trying to accompany Laura on her self-destructive path. In Mulholland Drive the corresponding scene is, of course, the Club Silencio sequence. In this scene the momentary bliss achieved between Betty and ‘Rita’ collapses as they are moved to tears and convulsions by the strangely powerful Spanish a capella lip sync performance of Roy Orbison’s(!) “Crying,” which somehow reveals to them that like the performance, which is “just a tape recording,” their relationship is “not real, it’s all an illusion.” These two scenes differ from their predecessors in that they make explicit that the type of specifically cinematic meaning that is exemplified in theses episodes must be take place between people, as the result of some shared recognition or understanding. We can now start to see what Nochimson was really getting at when she spoke of Lynch’s belief in “empathetic relationship to art”. In the earlier scenes this was implied through the way the scenes functioned for the spectator of the film: we were affected largely through witnessing the way the spectator-character was affected by the performance. In these later examples this crucial aspect of shared recognition is dramatized within the scenes itself. And as spectators, our experience is further enriched by our recognition of the understanding that is passing between characters onscreen.
Lost Highway also contains an interesting variation on the previous form of theatrical/musical performance sequence. In this case, the main character is not a spectator in the audience but a performer on stage. Jazz musician Fred Madison is playing saxophone in a club when he sees his wife Renee in the audience, leaving with another man. This contributes to the suspicions and mistrust that escalate to the level of murderous rage. Interestingly, this scene, which is framed as a memory, is presented in silence; we don’t hear the music Fred is playing. We could see this scene as functioning as an inversion of the musical/performance episodes in Fire Walk with Me and Mulholland Drive in that it portrays not some shared recognition between characters but their total incapacity to communicate or understand each other (although for the viewer, the sequence itself communicates this void between them beautifully).
These sequences, in all of their manifestations, also speak to the importance of music and sound in Lynch’s concept of a cinematic ‘Real.’ In each of the sequences discussed above, it is the music (or lack thereof in Lost Highway) that carries the emotional and affective force and which opens up a new understanding in the spectator-characters and in the viewers. As the Club Silencio scene makes explicit, it is the music itself, not necessarily even the lyrics, which generates the bulk of meaning in these scenes.
It is important to note that in the above cases these episodes are staged as purely theatrical or musical performances, and never explicitly reference the cinema itself, though their power for the viewer clearly derives from the way the event of the performance is cinematically expressed, not simply from the performance alone. Lynch seems to want to avoid any directly self-conscious or self-reflexive depiction of the cinema, most likely because these are moments when he wants the audience to be fully invested the cinematic image, not self-consciously critical of its’ mechanics or aesthetics (Lynch does allow room for a certain critical distance at other times, most notably in the absurd comic grotesque moments that reoccur throughout his work). One of the things that starts to change with Fire Walk with Me, Lost Highway, and Mulholland Drive is that Lynch begins to experiment with ways of creating these proto-cinematic episodes so that they involve elements which link them more directly to the cinema. The presence of some kind of disembodying technological device often plays an important role; video cameras, TV monitors, tape recorders, telephones, answering machines, and radios appear frequently in Fire Walk with Me, Lost Highway, and Mulholland Drive. However, the actual act of filmmaking is still absent (even for the most part in Mulholland Drive where filmmaking is part of the narrative), thus preserving the potential for the viewer’s full emotional investment and avoiding any distancing effect, whether that of a modernist self-consciousness, as in say Persona, or that of a postmodern self-reflexivity, as in say Adaptation. In this sense, the Club Silencio sequence in Mulholland Drive represents a merging of the typical Lynchian theatrical/musical performance scene and the recent scenes that allude more directly to the cinema through the presence of disembodying technology. I will return to this new type of proto-cinematic episode after examining some other important aspects of Fire Walk with Me, Lost Highway, and Mulholland Drive.
Fantasy/Dream vs. Reality
Most of what has been written on Mulholland Drive resists the interpretation that first section is some kind of dream/fantasy/projection and the second section depicts the ‘real’ events and characters behind the dream/fantasy (as examples of this see Nochimson’s review of Mulholland Drive in Film Quarterly and Philip Lopate’s “Welcome to L.A.” in Film Comment). This resistance seems to come about because critics and commentators sense that this interpretation will not ‘solve’ all of the films mysteries. In many ways this is absolutely correct; no attempt to work out the plot in terms of what is ‘real’ and what is 'fantasy' could ever succeed in discovering what is most important in the film. However, it is curious that no one makes any effort to reconcile this with the fact that in the second part of the film Lynch provides a number of hints and clues that seem to serve no purpose other than to explicitly encourage this dream/fantasy vs. reality interpretation of the narrative. This apparent contradiction seems to me that one of the most significant aspects of Lynch’s method, especially in Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive. (The exception to this critical trend is the previously mentioned piece in Salon.com by Bill Wyman, Max Garrone and Andy Klein, which provides the most thorough and well considered version of the fantasy’ vs. reality interpretation that I have encountered.)
While discussing Lost Highway, which has a similar two-part, fantasy-reality structure as Mulholland Drive, Zizek’s makes the insightful claim that in the film fantasy and reality do not have a horizontal relationship, in which one supports the other, but rather a vertical relationship wherein they exist in parallel, each feeding off and supporting the other (Zizek, 35). We might add that to this that, significantly, in Lost Highway it becomes essentially impossible to definitively designate one side as ‘fantasy’ and one side as ‘reality’. All that can be said is that that there are two separate realms of action, each of which seems to be ontologically distinct from the other, and that the relationship between them is structured along somewhat similar lines as the relationship between reality and fantasy. While Mulholland Drive does seem to indicate which section could be read as ‘dream/fantasy’ and which as ‘reality’, by constructing the narrative backwards (‘fantasy’ first, ‘reality’ second) Lynch makes it nearly impossible to connect all the ‘clues’ of the second part with their manifestations in the first part on a first viewing, largely because the transition between the two sections is so initially disorienting and unexpected. Thus, in both Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive, Lynch confuses the distinction between ‘fantasy/dream’ and ‘reality’ that the film itself appears to set up.
Why would Lynch set up what seem to be ontologically distinct realms and then present them in a way that defies definition or categorization? One effect seems to be to give primacy to the cinematic image over narrative coherence. This certainly doesn’t mean that there is no narrative explanation, but if one tries to reduce everything to the level of narrative meaning one misses an essential feature of Lynch’s work. On the other hand it would be equally mistaken to deny the existence of any narrative logic and to insist that Lynch simply strings together a series of powerful, loosely connected free floating images. A crucial aspect of Lynch’s cinema is clearly the complex dynamic at work between the type of meaning derived from narrative logic and the immediately affecting, visceral experience of the cinematic image, the way the two feed off and merge with and resist each other all at once.
We could say that Lynch acknowledges that the two states ‘fantasy/dream’ and ‘reality’ can be distinguished according to a certain narrative logic, but at the same time he also calls attention to the fact that this division can only take us so far; the most important mysteries will always remain beyond the reach of all narrative explanations. It is not so much that the line between the two states is unclear, rather that the relationship between them is more enigmatic and complex than is usually acknowledged (in films anyway). In the mysterious, uncanny atmosphere that results from this complex relationship between ‘reality’ and ‘fantasy’ Lynch sees the true potential for the kind of meaning that only the cinema can generate. The cinematic image is able to give expression to the mysteries that always remain unaccounted for by the narrative, and the viewer is able to experience and comprehend them in an immediate, visceral way. This is more valuable to Lynch than ‘solving’ a film in a narrative sense. In his own words:
"To me, a mystery is like a magnet. Whenever there is something unknown there is a pull to it […] When you only see a part, it is much stronger than seeing the whole. The whole might have a logic, but out of context the fragment takes on tremendous value of abstraction." (Lynch, 231)
In considering these issues it is illuminating to examine some important general structural features shared by Fire Walk with Me, Lost Highway, and Mulholland Drive.
Binary Structure in Fire Walk with Me, Lost Highway, and Mulholland Drive
Each film has a binary structure, with two clearly distinct narrative sections. In Fire Walk with Me, the first section revolves around two FBI agents investigating the murder of Teresa Banks in the town of Deer Meadow, while the second section tracks the last few weeks in the life of Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks before she is murdered by the same man who killed Teresa (Laura’s father, Leland Palmer). In Lost Highway, the first section centers on the strained relationship between jazz musician Fred Madison and his dark haired wife Renee which escalates until Fred kills Renee, while the second section is about the torrid affair between Pete, whom Fred has mysteriously transformed into, and Alice, a gangster’s moll who looks exactly like Renee, except that she is a blonde. In Mulholland Drive the first section revolves around the growing intimacy between Betty, a perky Hollywood newcomer with ambitions to be a star, and ‘Rita’, a sultry amnesiac car accident victim, as the two search for the latter’s true identity, while the second section deals with the deteriorating relationship between a washed up Hollywood wannabe named Diane, who looks exactly like Betty, and Camilla, a rising starlet who looks exactly like ‘Rita’, which ends when Diane hires a hit man to kill Camilla.
The event at the center of each of these three films is a murder that has been committed because of a doomed sexual relationship. In Fire Walk with Me, this is the killing of Laura Palmer by her own father Leland, who has been sexually abusing her. In Lost Highway, Fred is driven to kill Renee by an increasingly maddening combination of suspicion, sexual humiliation, and resentment. In Mulholland Drive, the jilted, bitter Diane hires a hit man to kill her former lover Camilla, who is now engaged to a man. But in fact, there are actually two crucial murders in each film, the second coming as a direct result of the first. In Lost Highway the second murder is that of Dick Laurent, a gangster with whom Renee used to be, or still is, involved. In Mulholland Drive the second killing is a suicide rather than a murder, and occurs when Diane shoots herself, unable to live with what she has done to Camilla. In Fire Walk with Me the murder of Laura Palmer is technically the second murder, though it is primary in terms of narrative importance. The murder of Teresa Banks precedes it chronologically, but this still fits the pattern we have identified since this murder is still a consequence of the doomed sexual relationship that ultimately results in Laura’s death (Leland kills Teresa after realizing that she knows Laura and is involved in prostitution with her).
In all three films, despite how the literal chronology of the narrative functions, there is a sense that both murders have already taken place at the start of the film. In Fire Walk with Me, Teresa Banks is killed in the very first scene, and of course most viewers presumably already know that Laura Palmer will be killed at the end of the film because of the TV series, (and if they were unfamiliar with the series they would know from the advertising of the film, which promised to reveal the last days of Laura Palmer). Lost Highway, with its looping mobius strip structure, literally begins and ends with the same two events, both of which are directly connected to Renee’s murder. These are: the announcement on the intercom that “Dick Laurent is dead,” which is first received and then delivered by Fred, and a car speeding down a highway at night, accompanied by David Bowies ‘I am Deranged’. And in Mulholland Drive, the first thing we see after the jitterbug sequence, is a p.o.v. shot of someone, breathing in a manner that suggests distress, falling back into bed. At the end of the film we will realize that these are probably the final moments before Diane kills herself. And although we see ‘Rita’ narrowly escape being killed by hit men in the first full scene of the film, we later find out that her counterpart in the second section, Camilla, is killed by a hit man hired by Diane. Thus, in all three films the two crucial killings are in some way contained in the very beginning of the film, suggesting some alternate chronology of events to the one we are given on screen and freeing us from the usual constraints of linear narrative logic.
In both Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive the two-part structure functions in a similar way. One part depicts the events leading up to the central murder (the first part in Lost Highway, the second part in Mulholland Drive). The other part can be seen as an attempt to restage or re-imagine the basic circumstances that led to the murder in hopes that this will lead to a different ending. This attempt to take back the murder ultimately fails, revealing in a new light the motives behind the murder. The structure of Fire Walk with Me works in a slightly different way. From this perspective the film’s relationship with the TV series is crucial. In a sense, the investigation of Laura’s murder, which provided the spine of the series, was a continuous attempt to re-imagine and restage the circumstances of the murder, as well as a continuous refusal or inability to acknowledge the true circumstances of the murder (the abusive incestuous relationship between Laura and her father). Fire Walk with Me can be seen as an attempt to re-imagine the world of the series in a new way (this is the main purpose of the first part of the film, which is set in the anti-Twin Peaks town of Deer Valley) which ultimately comes to the same conclusion, thus, again, revealing in a new light the circumstances and motives behind the central murder.
What we can conclude from these structural similarities is that in all of these films the murders and the motivations behind them---which is to say the emotions behind them--- form the core of truth around which the rest of the action revolves. In Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive we could even say that the murders are the only events that we can be certain definitely occurred. In this way, we can see how for Lynch the emotional/affective circumstances surrounding the murders effectively constitute the ‘Real’ in the films. If we are to say we understand either of these films, this must mean that we have grasped the affective/emotional logic behind the events of the murders, not necessarily the literal circumstances of their occurrence. In other words, we understand the affective/emotional causes and consequences, which do not always translate into the kind of rational cause and effect logic that is usually used to structure a narrative.
For Lynch, one of the great powers of the cinema is its capacity to uncover and reveal this emotional/affective logic, which otherwise appears irrational and incomprehensible. This same seemingly irrational logic may be similar to that which governs unconscious subjective states, and this accounts for the ‘dreamlike’ atmosphere of Lynch’s films as well as for the frequency with which scenes of dreams, fantasies and memories appear within the films. However, to insist, as Nochimson does, that Lynch’s whole body of work is founded on some notion of the “liberating power of subconscious energies”(Nochimson, ) is to miss the point. Lynch is not trying to recreate these subjective subconscious states or even to represent them accurately. He is aware that the cinema differs from them in a number of crucial ways and moreover that it is precisely from these differences that the cinema derives its true power. Cinematic meaning is not a totally subjective, isolated (and isolating) experience, as is dreaming, fantasizing, remembering, etc. Rather, as we have already seen, for Lynch cinematic meaning is a shared experience, generated between people. And we don’t need Nochimson’s appeal to some quasi-Jungian notion of the collective unconscious to explain this. Whether this ‘empathetic’ relationship takes place between individual audience members, between filmmaker and audience, or between performer and audience, the important thing is that a film is a concrete phenomenon and exists in the world, not just in the mind of a single person. The cinema is able to give palpable expression to the internal, irrational logic of emotional/affective states, and thus enables us to communicate them in way that would otherwise be impossible. We can perhaps see more clearly now the significance of the FBI security camera scene in Fire Walk with Me and with the mysterious videotapes in Lost Highway: both speak to the capacity of the cinematic image to express, give external form to, what would otherwise remain a subjective, seemingly irrational logic.
The reason that the cinematic image is capable of this is that somehow, despite the overwhelming predominance given to narrative in the cinema, it has developed into a form that allows what should appear as great gaps in narrative logic to be accepted as making some kind of sense beyond rational narrative logic. Here we can start to see the role of cinematic references and allusions in Lynch’s later work, particularly Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive. Lynch’s main points of references in these films are Hollywood films that feature some strange, irrational logic. This is most pronounced in the second part of Lost Highway, which is structured around numerous references to Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly, one of the most unusual ‘film noirs’ of the 1950’s. Aldrich’s film brought into the open and exploded (literally) all of the irrational, paranoid, nihilistic, sadistic, apocalyptic undercurrents that remained just below the surface of most ‘noirs’. Similarly, Mulholland Drive features numerous illusions to Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (including the very title of the film). Narrated by a corpse we see floating in a pool in the very first scene and featuring a hauntingly disorienting sense of time, Wilder’s film tells the story of how Hollywood sucked the life out of a failed screenwriter and a few others. As we have already noted, what Lynch is alluding to in these films is not their place within the cinematic cannon, nor their stylistic surfaces. It is not even the story or theme of Aldrich’s and Wilder’s films that is most important to Lynch (though they are certainly relevant). Rather, what is crucial about these films for Lynch is the way that they explicitly allow a seemingly irrational emotional/affective logic to clash with, and at times overtake, a more conventional narrative rationality. These films thus become prime instances of what I have called a specifically cinematic ‘real’ in Lynch’s work, a unique conception of the way that cinema generates meaning.
We can now see that the function of this binary ‘reality’/’fantasy’ structure in Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive is not simply some convenient or clever narrative device, nor is meant it to reveal anything precise about the actual relationship between reality and fantasy as it functions in everyday life (which is why readings Lynch that rely on Freudian or Lacanian theories can never really be satisfying). Rather Lynch stages these realms as distinct, even opposed, in order to enable himself to fully explore the cinema’s potential to create a type of experience for the viewer that crosses between and overlaps the experiences of ‘reality’ and ‘fantasy’ that we are used to. For Lynch cinematic meaning conflates the subjective phantasmagoric truths that we imaginatively invent in our dreams and fantasies with the literal, quotidian, shared truths that constitute our sense of everyday reality.
Multiple Realms in Fire Walk with Me, Lost Highway, and Mulholland Drive
All three films feature different realms that clearly have a distinct ontological status from each other. As we have already discussed, in Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive, the two narrative sections clearly belong to two ontologically distinct realms that seem to have something to do with the relationship between ‘fantasy’, ‘dream’ and ‘reality’, and yet cannot ever quite be definitively defined by these terms. Characters and situations from one section reappear transformed or altered in some way in the other section. However, in both films there are also characters that exist in the same form in both sections and that seem to have some understanding of the relationship between the two realms: the Mystery Man in Lost Highway, and the elderly couple and the person behind the dumpster in Mulholland Drive are the clearest examples. The existence of these characters seems to speak to the existence of yet another realm that appears to oversee the other two and move between them. In Fire Walk with Me, on a literal level the two narrative sections both appear to have the same ontological status and are distinct from each other only by the time and place of their setting, though as both Chion and Nochimson point out on a thematic level the town of Deer Valley functions “like a black hole somewhere in the universe, it is the absolute negation of Twin Peaks [of the TV series], an anti-Twin Peaks”(Chion, 148). However, there exists in Fire Walk with Me too an ontologically distinct realm that links the two narrative sections. This corresponds to the overseeing realms in Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive but is even more developed and intricate than in those films. This is the realm is where we find the Red Room and its host the Man from another place, as well as a number of characters, including Mike the one-armed man, Bob, and the Old Woman and the Masked Boy. And of course, there is FBI agent Dale Cooper, who is unique in that he is clearly situated within the realm of the basic narrative---he is investigating the murder of Teresa Banks and will, we know, be investigating the murder of Laura Palmer--- but he has access to the more elusive other realm as well (no other characters move in this direction).
It would take a detailed analysis of each of the films to work out the precise role of these individual characters within their respective films (and they are a varied bunch, some good, some evil, some benign, some indifferent, etc.). However, from the above comparison of these three films we can make some useful general remarks concerning the meaning of these characters in relation to the issues we have been discussing. The function of these strange characters that populate a mysterious overseeing realm in Lynch’s work is clearly not to signify Lynch’s belief in some literal hidden dimension, nor is it to represent some aspect of a character’s psyche or some abstract force (such as ‘evil’). Their true function is to dramatize the way cinema can move between and participate in seemingly distinct realms of existence (such as fantasy and reality) without ever quite belonging to either one. These characters provide a sort of cinematic consciousness that belongs to the film itself apart from any single character. Like the Mystery Man in Lost Highway who is simultaneously here and there, inside and outside, real and imagined, for Lynch the cinematic image always inhabits a space in between ‘fantasy’ and ‘reality’, never entirely one or the other (and never simply mixture of the two either), never exclusively inside a single subjectivity and never outside subjectivity altogether either.
Transitions
It is important that the transition between the two sections in each of these three films features an example of the new type of proto-cinematic episode that we touched on before, involving more direct references to the cinema. In Fire Walk with Me this is the strange scene in which agent Cooper comes in comes into the FBI office and insists on acting out a dream he had. He proceeds to stand in the hallway positioned under a security camera and then rushes in to the security room around the corner to check the monitor. He does this three times and the third time he checks the monitor he sees that his image has remained frozen on screen in monitor, so that he appears to simultaneously still be in the hallway and be in the security room looking at the monitor. Then, a man emerges from an elevator at the end of the hall and walks past Cooper‘s image into the main office. Cooper leaves the security room and rushes into the office where he is told that the man is an agent named Phillip Jeffries who has been missing for sometime. Jeffries then begins to utter a string of frantic, confused, disconnected utterances about someone named Judy and a room above a garage, as we get a frenetic montage featuring characters (including the Man from another place, Mike, and Bob) in eerily effected shots (reverse audio and image, superimpositions, slow motion, etc…). When this montage ends, Jeffries has vanished and Cooper and the others are told that by the front desk that he was never there. But when they check the security tape, sure enough it shows Jeffries coming down the hall past Cooper’s frozen image.
In Lost Highway the transitional proto-cinematic episode is a culmination of a series of scenes in which Fred and Renee have received mysterious videotapes that show up on their doorstep. The first showed a couple grainy black and white shots of the outside of their house. The second began the same but then cut to an even grainier shot moving through the hallways inside of the house, a shot which we had previously scene as Fred’s p.o.v. in his dream about looking for Renee. The third tape, which Fred watches alone, has the same two shots as the previous tape, but adds an even grainier shot which continues into the bedroom where Fred sees himself, knife in hand, standing over Renee’s bloody corpse. From this point the film cuts to Fred already in police custody for the murder.
In Mulholland Drive there are two such transitional scenes. The first is Betty’s audition scene, in which she transforms a clichéd, soap opera caliber script into a distressingly seductive, emotionally potent, and genuinely powerful performance which provides a glimpse of the pain and desperation that will consume her when she becomes Diane in the second part of the film. This scene is unique among the other proto-cinematic episodes in that it concerns itself not with the way the combination of sound, music, image and performance can generate cinematic meaning, but rather provides proof that this can be achieved solely through the unsettling, irrational, seemingly miraculous power of acting in the cinema to express otherwise indescribable emotional/affective states. (Note, this is still something acting can achieve only in the cinema, not on stage: the fact Betty’s audition scene is played almost entirely in one unbroken close up greatly contributes to the unexpected power of the scene.) The other transitional episode main in Mulholland Drive is the Club Silencio scene, already discusses above, in which the revelation of the disembodying technology behind the powerfully affecting illusion of the heart-wrenching performance effectively undermines and destroys the illusion of stability and bliss that seems to exist between the two women.
In fact, when we look closely at the films, we see that almost without fail, every time elements from one realm seep into and destabilize the other, every time the mysterious overseeing realm disrupt the narrative, Lynch communicates this through the use of some special cinematic technique such as slow motion, reverse motion, strobe lighting, superimpositions, distorted images, overtly stylized use of sound or music, etc. These occur moments occur too frequently throughout the films to make a full list, but examples would include the following.
In Fire Walk with Me:
-the ‘reverse’ sound and motion in the Red room
-the scenes in which the old woman and the masked boy materialize from nowhere and then dissolve into thin air
-the slow motion, drone of the ceiling fan outside Laura’s bedroom, which we see whenever her father has sex with her
-the unusual sound mix in the traffic jam scene in which the one armed man confronts Laura and Leland
In Lost Highway:
-the Mystery Man’s face appearing to Fred superimposed over Renee’s face following their failed lovemaking and his dream about killing her
-the backward exploding beach house in that appears to Fred in prison before he transforms into Pete
-the flickering slow motion shot of Alice accompanied by Lou Reed’s “Magic Moment” that occurs the first time Pete sees her (which is also the first time we see her) as Alice the blonde
-the unmotivated strobe lighting and lens distortions that occur first as Pete is wanders down the halls of Andy’s house looking for Alice, then later as Fred walks through the halls of the Lost Highway Motel searching for Renee
In Mulholland Drive:
-the scene at the film studio in which Betty and Adam exchange a long, meaningful, slow motion gaze accompanied by the 50’s song
-the superimpositions that multiplying the images Betty and ‘Rita’ so that they fan out overtop of each other, which occur right after they find Diane Selwyn’s corpse
-the numerous strobe and fog effects, as well as the physically impossible appearances and disappearances that occur in the Club Silencio sequence
-miniaturization of the elderly couple and the strobe and smoke effects that occur as the two of them chase Diane into the bedroom and drive her to shoot herself
Lynch is routinely accused of self-indulgence for his repeated use of such stylistic flourishes, which many see as being empty, self-indulgent exercises in an MTV-inspired style (as examples of this, see Stephanie Zacherek’s review of “Lost Highway” in Salon.com, or the Ebert review quoted at the beginning of this essay). However, we should now be able to see that, on the contrary, these devices are an integral part of Lynch’s complex concept of how cinematic meaning is generated. Discussing the ceiling fan in Fire Walk with Me, Chion says that such elements in Lynch’s work should not be taken symbolically, “nor can reduced to some primary function. They are life itself, vital power, absurd, ever-present”(Chion, 151). We could add that for Lynch these stylistic devices create space for a kind of specifically cinematic perception, that they grasp “life itself” in specifically a cinematic way. These effects create moments in which the normal boundaries of time, space and identity become less rigid, in which the lines dividing past and present, memory and fantasy, dream and reality become blurred and we are momentarily freed from a rational, cause and effect logic. These moments enable us to perceive events in their totality somehow, cause and effect, intention and consequence, hope and regret, desire and resentment, all rolled into one inextricably tangled web and experienced viscerally in a sustained flurry of sound, image, music, and performance. In this sense, Nochimson is correct in her insistence that Lynch wants to free us from the limiting perspective of rational order, but her claim that he is trying to open us up to the “liberating powers of the subconscious” is misleading. It would be more accurate to say that he is trying to open us up to the liberating powers of the cinema.
Conclusion
I have tried to draw attention to some of the prominent features of Lynch’s increasingly explicit exploration of how meaning is generated in the cinema. In examining certain relevant aspects of Fire Walk with Me, Lost Highway, and Mulholland Drive, I have attempted to show that for Lynch the cinematic ‘Real’ is a realm where fantasy and reality both fall apart as masks of the other. In this chaotic realm---which is neither the realm of the subconscious dream world, nor the realm of postmodern ambivalence--- emotion and affect are cut loose from any rational narrative cause and effect structure, and Lynch offers the viewer an immediate, visceral, sensual experience that touches on an aspect of the ‘Real’ which would otherwise remain inaccessible. I have concentrated on this aspect of Lynch’s work, because I feel it is necessary to try to understand how meaning is generated within the films themselves before trying to impose some external theoretical framework of the film. This is particularly important in the case of a filmmaker like Lynch, for whom the unique nature cinematic meaning is clearly an explicit concern. To be sure, Lynch’s work is rich in issues and themes that benefit from being examined from a broad range of critical and theoretical perspectives (sexuality, authenticity, identity, consciousness, violence, etc.), and it is not surprising that this approach has been predominant in most serious studies of Lynch’s work. I have admittedly had to ignore a number of these issues in concentrating on how Lynch conceives of the cinematic image. However, the role of these other issues in Lynch’s work will ultimately benefit from a more precise examination of the way Lynch himself defines the cinema within his own films.
Notes
[1] Throughout this essay I will use the term ‘cinematic image’ as a general way to refer to the all forms moving image/sound combinations (the emphasis on the role of sound in Lynch’s cinema can hardly be overstated)---including television, video, and film---as Lynch makes no a prior distinctions between the way these mediums function.
Works Cited
Chion, Michel. David Lynch. Trans. Robert Julien. British Film Institute, London. 1995.
Ebert, Roger “Lost Highway” http://www.suntimes.com/ebert/ebert_reviews/1997/02/022704.html
Holden, Stephen “Mulholland Drive: Hollywood Seen as a Fun House Fantasy” http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/06/movies/06DRIV.html?ex=1083384000&en=c47e474ea66d26d9&ei=5070
Lopate, Phillip “Welcome to L.A.” Film Comment Sept/Oct 2001 (vol. 37, #5)
Lynch, David Lynch on Lynch. ed. by Chris Rodley. Faber and Faber Limited, London. 1997.
Nochimson, Martha P. “Mulholland Drive” Film Quarterly Fall 2002 (vol. 56, #1)
Nochimpson, Martha P. The Passion of David Lynch: Wild At Heart in Hollywood. University of Texas Press, Austin. 1997.
Wyman, Bill “Everything you wanted to know about "Mulholland Drive"with Max Garrone and Andy Klein. http://archive.salon.com/ent/movies/feature/2001/10/23/mulholland_drive_analysis/
Zacherek, Sephanie “Lost Highway” http://dir.salon.com/feb97/highway970228.html
Zizek, Slavoj The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch’s Lost Highway. The University Of Washington Press, Seattle. 2000.
