![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
somethin' bit me bad
random linkage of david lynch tings for the girl who lay awake half the night talking about betty:
Lynch's two worlds - a not-that-great essay looking at a lot of his films, written in 2003.
untitled lotrips in the style of lynch - random mindfuckery which had some genders changed and submitted for a creative writing folio, har.
discussion with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
almostnever on lynch's themes etc, which i drew on quite a bit for
my informal tute presentation paper on subjectivity in lost hwy/mulholland dr:
David Lynch's films as fantasy
Although McGowan thoroughly argues the point that Lynch's later, more surrealist films are based around the separation between the human psychological concepts of desire and fantasy, and that the anxiety the films are steeped in are due to the unnaturalness of this separation, I'm going to take a slightly different angle and argue that Lynch's films, Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive in particular, could be said to address the more philosophical than psychological issues of subjectivity and representation, not necessarily on an individual level explored through the characters, but a comment on the medium of film itself. In other words, the anxiety and impact of Lynch's films lie in the fact that he is highlighting that the entire thing is fantasy - ie. film.
Lost Highway
As a protagonist with very little dialogue, everything that Fred says has a degree of weight, even before Lynch's direction and construction of sound and cinematography makes the speech in the early scenes of the film so constricted, forced and weighted. Thus his statement about why he doesn't like video cameras - "I like to remember things my own way… not necessarily the way they happened" could very well be considered a blueprint concept for the rest of the film.
Moments of extreme tension and anxiety throughout the film are often built around moments of subjectivity - the most obvious being the video tape of Fred and Renee's house, but also the many times phones and phone conversations are used throughout the film. Lynch challenges the usually taken-for-granted 'seeing [or hearing] is believing' idiom, raising the idea that what we see and hear is in fact quite subjective - it's filtered through our own personal experience - something which Lynch highlights and makes an issue by removing it that one step to video camera and telephone.
The anxiety around the subjectivity of the telephone begins when Fred calls home from the jazz club, obviously to chase up Renee and see if his suspicions regarding her infidelity is correct. There is no answer at home, and the viewer is provided with shot after shot showing the telephone ringing in many different rooms of the house - ostensibly to possibly this is Fred imagining what is happening at home (ie, no one is home), and yet the camera frame doesn't shift away from the telephone - there is nothing to say that Renee isn't home, and there is no way Fred can know this just from calling. In fact, when Fred gets home Renee is asleep in bed and the audience - like Fred - is left not knowing whether she was asleep all along or whether the house in fact was empty earlier.
A more chilling scene is when Fred meets the Mystery Man at Andy's party - the Man prompts Fred to use his cell phone to call his own phone and establish that the Mystery Man is at Fred's house right now, as well as standing in front of him. Fred is relying on the supposed objectivity of experience - what he can hear through the phone - to establish the 'truth' of the situation, which in fact, does not make sense at all. How can the Mystery Man be at Fred's house as well as at Andy's party? Lynch makes no attempt to explain it.
This is one of the first instance of many throughout the film where reality is questioned - the main instance, of course, being the fact that abruptly, Fred is no longer in his cell on death row, but rather a completely different person, Pete, is there, once again with no explanation. It's almost as if Lynch, a highly self-aware film maker, is pushing the boundaries of the medium if not technologically then psychologically/thematically, pushing his audience to the limit of their suspension of disbelief and causing so much subconscious tension and anxiety through his carefully crafted stylistic elements (sound, cinematography, colour and lighting, direction of his actors) that, without overstepping the limit and losing the audience entirely, Lynch manages to question the subjectivity of film itself.
In other words, how exactly Pete got into Fred's cell and wherever Fred ended up is completely irrelevant, because they are fictional characters. Neither of them exist. There's no use getting confused about why Patricia Arquette plays both female leads, or how the temporality of the film forms a 'Mobius strip', because there is no time within the film - there are no such characters in reality, and anxiety is further heightened in the audience as they try to understand these unreal things.
Not to say that Lynch introduces random and surreal elements to his films merely to bring attention to the fact that it is a film and nothing more. Lynch is using the medium of film to further address the issue of subjectivity and representation. In fact, the character of Fred could be said to represent the journey through anxiety of subjectivity - it's for Fred that the (previously thought-of as trustworthy) medium of the telephone breaks down, it's Fred who can't understand or trust his own instincts regarding his wife's fidelity; he even only discovers that he's murdered his wife when he sees it on the videotape. Fred's own subjectivity - remembering things "my own way, not necessarily the way they happened" is coming back to haunt him, when every other medium thought of as objective is revealed to be just as fickle. His terror of the Mystery Man's video camera toward the end of the film (after Pete's descent back into Fred is spurred on by seeing 'Alice' on the huge screen in Andy's house, challenging his perception of how things are) is not misplaced.
Mulholland Drive
Mulholland Drive addresses similar themes of subjective reality. Ostensibly the confusing narrative structure of the film could be explained thus: Diane, a struggling actress, hires an assassin to murder her lover, movie-star Camilla, for being so blatantly unfaithful. Consumed with guilt, Diane creates an alternate reality for herself - a fantasy in which the players in Diane's life are re-cast and Diane herself becomes a different person. But Diane is unable to sustain the fantasy of her alternate life, and as it breaks down she's driven insane, and eventually to suicide.
The fact that the film is set in Hollywood - the home of representation and subjectivity - is the first clue to Lynch's thematic intentions, and throughout the film he carries on the same imagery; the man in the Winkies whose dream becomes 'reality', the assassin who pretends to be a friend before carrying out his hit, the surreally fictional constructs of The Cowboy (his ten-gallon hat, southern accent and corral), and the director's wife cheating with the Pool Guy (complete with mullet and handlebar moustache). Diane's constructed reality is revealed to be fiction the same way Lynch reveals the entire film to be fiction. Where Fred was trapped inside Lost Highway, Rita - Diane's construction of Camilla - is trapped inside Diane's alternate reality, utterly subjected to Diane's whims of her character, in constant anguish over her lack of identity; where Betty can't help herself but keep trying to solve the 'mystery' that is, in fact the revelation that she herself is a construct.
Rita's anxiety is that she is no one without Diane's constructive influence. In her sleep she cries out "Silencio", over and over, leading to Betty and Rita visiting the silencio club. The performances at the club further highlight the subjectivity that Lynch is bringing into question. Not only is the song a performance - a copy, an imitation - of an already-existing song (Roy Orbison's "Crying"), but the performance itself is a merely a representation of a performance, regardless of the emotional reaction it draws from the audience.
Which inevitably brings up Baudrillard's concept of the simulacrum - where copies are so far removed from reality that they no longer bear any relation to the reality they have come to replace. Diane's reality, a representation of reality that is entirely subjective, becomes not merely a fantasy but her actual reality (to the point where she can only escape it through death). For Rita there is no real reality - she exists only as Diane creates her, and when Diane fails to create a history, a character for her, she is as far removed from reality as Baudrillard's Simulacrum is removed from the Real. Rita's "Silencio" -- silence, a significant concept in Lynch's films, where a constant background noise plays a large part in constructing tone and atmosphere -- suggests a void, a nothingness; repeated at the end of the film by the blue-haired lady from the club, after supernatural smoke has enveloped and completely hidden Diane's body (the same way it enveloped the MC at the Silencio Club, further highlighting that Diane is the Master of Ceremonies of her own reality); and after the screen fades to black and holds. Is Lynch commenting on Baudrillard's perceived threat that we've already reached the fourth stage and are living in a simulacrum? Diane's death and thus withdrawal from her 'fantasy' reality coincides with the end of the film - is the final 'silencio' referring to her death, or to the fact that the film is over and the audience must now go back to the 'reality' outside the movie theatre?
Bibliography
Baudrillard, Jean 1994, “The Precession of Simulacra” in Simulacra and Simulation, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor
Celeste, Reni 2000, "Lost Highway: Unveiling Cinema's Yellow Brick Road" http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/film-philosophy/files/paper.celeste.html
Denzin, Norman 1988, "Blue Velvet Post-modern Contradictions" in Theory, Culture and Society, Vol.5, pp.461-73.
Herzogenrath, Bernd 1999, "On the Lost Highway: Lynch and Lacan, Cinema and Cultural Pathology" in Other Voices, vol.1, no.3, http://dept.English.upenn.edu/~ov/1.3/bh/highway.html
Internet Movie Database, http://www.imdb.com
McGowan, Todd 2000, "Finding Ourselves on a Lost Highway: David Lynch's Lesson in Fantasy" in Cinema Journal, vol.39:2, University of Texas Press, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cinema_journal/v039/39.2mcgowan.html
FILMOGRAPHY
Lynch, David, Blue Velvet, 1986
Lynch, David, Eraserhead, 1977
Lynch, David, Lost Highway, 1997
Lynch, David, Mulholland Dr., 2001
Lynch, David, Twin Peaks (season 1), 1990
Lynch, David, Wild At Heart, 1990
Lynch's two worlds - a not-that-great essay looking at a lot of his films, written in 2003.
untitled lotrips in the style of lynch - random mindfuckery which had some genders changed and submitted for a creative writing folio, har.
discussion with
almostnever on lynch's themes etc, which i drew on quite a bit formy informal tute presentation paper on subjectivity in lost hwy/mulholland dr:
David Lynch's films as fantasy
Although McGowan thoroughly argues the point that Lynch's later, more surrealist films are based around the separation between the human psychological concepts of desire and fantasy, and that the anxiety the films are steeped in are due to the unnaturalness of this separation, I'm going to take a slightly different angle and argue that Lynch's films, Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive in particular, could be said to address the more philosophical than psychological issues of subjectivity and representation, not necessarily on an individual level explored through the characters, but a comment on the medium of film itself. In other words, the anxiety and impact of Lynch's films lie in the fact that he is highlighting that the entire thing is fantasy - ie. film.
Lost Highway
As a protagonist with very little dialogue, everything that Fred says has a degree of weight, even before Lynch's direction and construction of sound and cinematography makes the speech in the early scenes of the film so constricted, forced and weighted. Thus his statement about why he doesn't like video cameras - "I like to remember things my own way… not necessarily the way they happened" could very well be considered a blueprint concept for the rest of the film.
Moments of extreme tension and anxiety throughout the film are often built around moments of subjectivity - the most obvious being the video tape of Fred and Renee's house, but also the many times phones and phone conversations are used throughout the film. Lynch challenges the usually taken-for-granted 'seeing [or hearing] is believing' idiom, raising the idea that what we see and hear is in fact quite subjective - it's filtered through our own personal experience - something which Lynch highlights and makes an issue by removing it that one step to video camera and telephone.
The anxiety around the subjectivity of the telephone begins when Fred calls home from the jazz club, obviously to chase up Renee and see if his suspicions regarding her infidelity is correct. There is no answer at home, and the viewer is provided with shot after shot showing the telephone ringing in many different rooms of the house - ostensibly to possibly this is Fred imagining what is happening at home (ie, no one is home), and yet the camera frame doesn't shift away from the telephone - there is nothing to say that Renee isn't home, and there is no way Fred can know this just from calling. In fact, when Fred gets home Renee is asleep in bed and the audience - like Fred - is left not knowing whether she was asleep all along or whether the house in fact was empty earlier.
A more chilling scene is when Fred meets the Mystery Man at Andy's party - the Man prompts Fred to use his cell phone to call his own phone and establish that the Mystery Man is at Fred's house right now, as well as standing in front of him. Fred is relying on the supposed objectivity of experience - what he can hear through the phone - to establish the 'truth' of the situation, which in fact, does not make sense at all. How can the Mystery Man be at Fred's house as well as at Andy's party? Lynch makes no attempt to explain it.
This is one of the first instance of many throughout the film where reality is questioned - the main instance, of course, being the fact that abruptly, Fred is no longer in his cell on death row, but rather a completely different person, Pete, is there, once again with no explanation. It's almost as if Lynch, a highly self-aware film maker, is pushing the boundaries of the medium if not technologically then psychologically/thematically, pushing his audience to the limit of their suspension of disbelief and causing so much subconscious tension and anxiety through his carefully crafted stylistic elements (sound, cinematography, colour and lighting, direction of his actors) that, without overstepping the limit and losing the audience entirely, Lynch manages to question the subjectivity of film itself.
In other words, how exactly Pete got into Fred's cell and wherever Fred ended up is completely irrelevant, because they are fictional characters. Neither of them exist. There's no use getting confused about why Patricia Arquette plays both female leads, or how the temporality of the film forms a 'Mobius strip', because there is no time within the film - there are no such characters in reality, and anxiety is further heightened in the audience as they try to understand these unreal things.
Not to say that Lynch introduces random and surreal elements to his films merely to bring attention to the fact that it is a film and nothing more. Lynch is using the medium of film to further address the issue of subjectivity and representation. In fact, the character of Fred could be said to represent the journey through anxiety of subjectivity - it's for Fred that the (previously thought-of as trustworthy) medium of the telephone breaks down, it's Fred who can't understand or trust his own instincts regarding his wife's fidelity; he even only discovers that he's murdered his wife when he sees it on the videotape. Fred's own subjectivity - remembering things "my own way, not necessarily the way they happened" is coming back to haunt him, when every other medium thought of as objective is revealed to be just as fickle. His terror of the Mystery Man's video camera toward the end of the film (after Pete's descent back into Fred is spurred on by seeing 'Alice' on the huge screen in Andy's house, challenging his perception of how things are) is not misplaced.
Mulholland Drive
Mulholland Drive addresses similar themes of subjective reality. Ostensibly the confusing narrative structure of the film could be explained thus: Diane, a struggling actress, hires an assassin to murder her lover, movie-star Camilla, for being so blatantly unfaithful. Consumed with guilt, Diane creates an alternate reality for herself - a fantasy in which the players in Diane's life are re-cast and Diane herself becomes a different person. But Diane is unable to sustain the fantasy of her alternate life, and as it breaks down she's driven insane, and eventually to suicide.
The fact that the film is set in Hollywood - the home of representation and subjectivity - is the first clue to Lynch's thematic intentions, and throughout the film he carries on the same imagery; the man in the Winkies whose dream becomes 'reality', the assassin who pretends to be a friend before carrying out his hit, the surreally fictional constructs of The Cowboy (his ten-gallon hat, southern accent and corral), and the director's wife cheating with the Pool Guy (complete with mullet and handlebar moustache). Diane's constructed reality is revealed to be fiction the same way Lynch reveals the entire film to be fiction. Where Fred was trapped inside Lost Highway, Rita - Diane's construction of Camilla - is trapped inside Diane's alternate reality, utterly subjected to Diane's whims of her character, in constant anguish over her lack of identity; where Betty can't help herself but keep trying to solve the 'mystery' that is, in fact the revelation that she herself is a construct.
Rita's anxiety is that she is no one without Diane's constructive influence. In her sleep she cries out "Silencio", over and over, leading to Betty and Rita visiting the silencio club. The performances at the club further highlight the subjectivity that Lynch is bringing into question. Not only is the song a performance - a copy, an imitation - of an already-existing song (Roy Orbison's "Crying"), but the performance itself is a merely a representation of a performance, regardless of the emotional reaction it draws from the audience.
Which inevitably brings up Baudrillard's concept of the simulacrum - where copies are so far removed from reality that they no longer bear any relation to the reality they have come to replace. Diane's reality, a representation of reality that is entirely subjective, becomes not merely a fantasy but her actual reality (to the point where she can only escape it through death). For Rita there is no real reality - she exists only as Diane creates her, and when Diane fails to create a history, a character for her, she is as far removed from reality as Baudrillard's Simulacrum is removed from the Real. Rita's "Silencio" -- silence, a significant concept in Lynch's films, where a constant background noise plays a large part in constructing tone and atmosphere -- suggests a void, a nothingness; repeated at the end of the film by the blue-haired lady from the club, after supernatural smoke has enveloped and completely hidden Diane's body (the same way it enveloped the MC at the Silencio Club, further highlighting that Diane is the Master of Ceremonies of her own reality); and after the screen fades to black and holds. Is Lynch commenting on Baudrillard's perceived threat that we've already reached the fourth stage and are living in a simulacrum? Diane's death and thus withdrawal from her 'fantasy' reality coincides with the end of the film - is the final 'silencio' referring to her death, or to the fact that the film is over and the audience must now go back to the 'reality' outside the movie theatre?
Bibliography
Baudrillard, Jean 1994, “The Precession of Simulacra” in Simulacra and Simulation, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor
Celeste, Reni 2000, "Lost Highway: Unveiling Cinema's Yellow Brick Road" http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/film-philosophy/files/paper.celeste.html
Denzin, Norman 1988, "Blue Velvet Post-modern Contradictions" in Theory, Culture and Society, Vol.5, pp.461-73.
Herzogenrath, Bernd 1999, "On the Lost Highway: Lynch and Lacan, Cinema and Cultural Pathology" in Other Voices, vol.1, no.3, http://dept.English.upenn.edu/~ov/1.3/bh/highway.html
Internet Movie Database, http://www.imdb.com
McGowan, Todd 2000, "Finding Ourselves on a Lost Highway: David Lynch's Lesson in Fantasy" in Cinema Journal, vol.39:2, University of Texas Press, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cinema_journal/v039/39.2mcgowan.html
FILMOGRAPHY
Lynch, David, Blue Velvet, 1986
Lynch, David, Eraserhead, 1977
Lynch, David, Lost Highway, 1997
Lynch, David, Mulholland Dr., 2001
Lynch, David, Twin Peaks (season 1), 1990
Lynch, David, Wild At Heart, 1990
no subject
no subject