For a Baroque Aesthetic, A study of the Films of David Lynch

CHAPTER III:

THE MONTAGE OF CONFUSION

1

What is meant is a style of composition which, with more or less tectonic means, makes of the picture a self-contained entity, pointing everywhere back to itself, while, conversely, the style of open form everywhere points out beyond itself and purposely looks limitless, although, of course, secret limits continue to exist, and make it possible for the picture to be self-contained in the aesthetic sense.^149(*)

Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History.

The preceding chapter developed an approach to the shot and how its conception reflected a certain vision of the world; this chapter is concerned with the organization of those shots: the montage.

The authors of Aesthetics of Film define montage as the larger realm of editing. Editing is the technical term for a process that can be `summarized by its three large operations: selection, assembly, and final cutting.'^150(*) The authors further add:

The objects upon which the editing operates are shots of a film; hence, editing consists of manipulating the shots in order to construct another object - the film.^151(*)

The notion of montage proceeds from the functions of editing but they are encompassed within a larger definition:

Montage is the principle governing the organization of film elements, both visual and audio, or the combination of these elements, by juxtaposing them, connecting them, and/or controlling their duration.^152(*)

Aumont and his co-authors precise that the notion of montage is only interesting `within a theoretical and analytical perspective.'<sup>153(*)</sup> Montage is the aesthetic dimension of editing. According to Sergei M. Eisenstein (1898-1948) `montage is the whole of the film, the Idea.'^154(*)

Thus, if editing was first used by Edwin S. Porter for The Great Train Robbery in 1903, the first to have integrated editing into a whole system of representation is David Wark Griffith (1875-1948) with The Birth of a Nation in 1914. In 1925, Eisenstein will push further the possibilities of montage with The Battleship Potemkin. During his life Eisenstein will develop, through his films, teaching and writings, a theoretical system based on the concept of montage.

Different conceptions of montage were developed in the United States, the Soviet Union, France and Germany during the 1920s. In Hollywood however, it is the conception of Griffith which dominated its development. Deleuze describes the montage according to Griffith, as the composition of a `great organic unity':

The organism is, firstly, unity in diversity, that is a set of differentiated parts. [...] The parts must necessarily act and react on each other in order to show how they simultaneously enter into conflict and threaten the unity of the organic set, and how they overcome the conflict or restore the unity.^155(*)

Thus diversity only exists as a part of the overall unity; it is contained within this unity. The form of the classical Hollywood film contains diversity through the «narrativization» of the events as Stephen Heath explains in Questions of Cinema:

The classical economy of film is its organization as organic unity and the form of that economy is narrative, the narrativization of film. [...] The narration is to be held on the narrated, the enunciation on the enounced; filmic procedures are to be held as narrative instances (very much as `cues'), exhaustively, without gap or contradiction.^156(*)

Heath affirms that it is this process of narrativization that acts as containment rather than the supposed transparency of the medium, which has often been associated with the classical cinema:

What is sometimes vaguely referred to as «transparency» has its meaning in this narrativization: the proposal of a discourse that disavows its operations and positions in the name of a signified that it proposes as its pre-existent justification. «Transparency», moreover, is entirely misleading in so far as it implies that narrativization has necessarily to do with some simple «invisibility.»^157(*)

Thus what the classical film tries to eliminate in its containment of the events, is the possibility of diversity, a heterogeneity which would not be absorbed in the organic unity. Heath sums up this process:

Narrativization is scene and movement, movement and scene, the reconstruction of the subject in the pleasure of that balance (with genres as specific instances of equilibrium) - for homogeneity, containment. What is foreclosed in the process is not its production - often signified as such, from genre instances down to this or that «impossible» shot - but the terms of the unity of that production (narration on narrated, enunciation on enounced), the other scene of its vision of the subject, the outside - heterogeneity, contradiction, history - of its coherent address.^158(*)

This analysis of the conditions of production of the classical film is further echoed by the authors of Film Theory, An Introduction: `the fundamental point is that classical cinema does not efface the signs of its production, it contains them'^159(*).

This containment is achieved by a strict articulation of symmetries and asymmetries as well as the use of variations and repetitions as is developed by Lapsley and Westlake quoting Raymond Bellour in an analysis of Alfred Hitchcock's film The Birds (1963):

`Symmetry and asymmetry develop in a condensed series, in a dual movement of centring and decentring'. That is, the asymmetry opened up by the progression of the plot is contained and offset by the system of formal symmetries in the narration. Bellour's analyses powerfully demonstrated that fundamental to the working of narrative is the play of repetition and difference.^160(*)

The films of Hitchcock are often taken as examples that show perfect control of the cinematic space within the frame as well as within the film. It is a scene from Hitchcock's Suspicion (1941) that Stephen Heath chooses to comment on in Questions of Cinema. Two police inspectors come to visit Lina informing her of events that can only further her suspicions about the behaviour of her husband Johnnie. Heath points to the continuation of the action `within a movement of rhyme and balance, of sustained coherence' between the arrival of the inspectors to the moment of their departure. ^161(*) He concludes:

The coherence is clear - the end comes round to the beginning, one shot echoing the other in the resolution of rhyme - at the same time that the distance travelled forward in the scene is registered, space redefined in the light of the dramatization effected.^162(*)

This control over the action is given a Freudian perspective by Lapsley and Westlake:

The suggestion is that texts are characteristically economies of repetition and variation, involving symmetry and asymmetry, aimed at establishing mastery over a lack.^163(*)

However, the Freudian theory of containment also introduces the possibility of disintegration, as the authors of Film Theory pursue:

If, as has been suggested, narrative involves an act of containment, then, according to Freud, it can never be entirely successful since the repressed is always liable to return to trouble the sought-for unity and homogeneity of the text.^164(*)

The foreclosure is thus never completed. The possibility of disintegration is present within the scene of Suspicion described by Heath, at the entrance of the two inspectors:

The composition is faultless, the framing describes the theatricality of the inspectors' entry (the ring at the door, the interruption, the unknown), with the columns, steps and walls providing a stage effect, the characters are centred, perspective is sharp: the image is in every sense clearly directed. But not quite. Out of the action, breaking the clarity of direction, obstinately turned away, one of the inspectors is pulling to the left, gazing abruptly at something hidden from us.^165(*)

What the inspector Benson is looking at is revealed to the spectator, in a later shot, as a Picasso cubist painting hung in the entrance hall. Benson will remain absorbed in his contemplation of the painting while the maid comes to escort them in; he has to be called back by the other inspector. This sequence will repeat itself on their way out, as Lina accompanies them to the door, Benson is again pulled away from the scene by his fascination for the painting. As Heath points out this `painting has no reason, is useless, beyond the limits of the film,'^166(*) he concludes:

Benson's painting [...] has its effect as missing spectacle: problem of point of view, different framing, disturbance of the law and its inspectoring eye, interruption of the homogeneity of the narrative economy, it is somewhere else again, another scene, another story, another space.^167(*)

It is as if Hitchcock had wanted to introduce the irreducibility of diversity even in the most constructed framework. Characters and events can never be perfectly contained. This ambiguity in Hitchcock's films is also present in the structure of The Birds, as analysed by Noël Burch in Theory of Film Practice:

Here the entire structure, even the actual style of the film is implicit in the subject itself, the gradual destruction of the American dream, of the sterile and comfortable fantasies of middle-class life as Hollywood depicts it. Starting with the first peck of a bird's beak on Tippi Hedren's forehead, middle-class reality is progressively contaminated by violence; the film's entire development is based on this spread of violence, which underlies both the individual images and the over-all découpage. The film, like the subject on which it is based, has a beginning, but it does not have an end, or if it does, it is buried under the millions of birds that have invaded the screen (the world). The Birds is a film in which everything at every level derives directly from the premise laid down by the basic plot.^168(*)

Thus the original unity is not restored; the heterogeneous elements - the birds - are neither eliminated nor controlled. There is no easy resolution, the ending points out toward possibilities, not certainties, for the characters escaping in the early dawn. Hitchcock probes deliberately at those gaps full of uncertainty and diversity within the classical system, which cannot be eliminated as pointed out by Lapsley and Westlake:

Beneficent or not, (classical) narrative cinema offers the illusion of contradiction resolved when in reality it yields nothing of the sort.^169(*)

Other forms of narrativity have tried to accommodate the diversity of the event as a principle of montage and thus open up the possibilities.

2

The picture ceases to be an architecture. In the figure the architectonic factors are the secondary ones. The significant element of form is not the scaffolding, but the breath of life which brings flux and movement into the rigid form. In the one case, the values of being, in the other, the value of change. In the one case, beauty resides in the determinate, in the other, in the indeterminate.^170(*)

Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History

In Theory of Film Practice, Noël Burch has quoted André Hodeir's definition of form:

The form of a work is that mode of being which ensures its unity while tending to promote, at the same time, the greatest possible diversity.^171(*)

Thus positing the notion of form as compatible with diversity, not as its containment but as its expression.

The differences in the conception of the frame can help to understand the differences of conception of the whole of the film. The frame determines the relationship between the on-screen and the off-screen space. The off-screen space is defined in Aesthetics of Film:

The off-screen may be defined as the collection of elements (characters, settings...) that, while not being included in the image itself are nonetheless connected to that visible space in imaginary fashion for the spectator.^172(*)

Quoting Noël Burch, Stephen Heath goes further in the implications of the off-screen possibilities:

Burch writes that `off-screen space has only an intermittent or, rather, fluctuating existence during any film, and structuring this fluctuation can become a powerful tool in a film-maker's hands'. The term «fluctuation» is excellent, yet it must be seen that the work of classical continuity is not to hide or ignore off-screen space but, on the contrary, to contain it, to regularize its fluctuation in a constant movement of reappropriation.^173(*)

The difference of interaction between what is in the frame and what is not is at the core of the distinction established by André Bazin between mask and frame. Gilles Deleuze in Cinema 1 elaborated on the two terms:

If we return to Bazin's alternative of mask or frame, we see that sometimes the frame works like a mobile mask according to which every set is extended into a larger homogeneous set with which it communicates, and sometimes it works as a pictorial frame which isolates a system and neutralises its environment. This duality is most clearly expressed in Renoir and Hitchcock; in the former space and action always go beyond the limits of the frame which only takes elements from an area; in the latter the frame `confines all the components', and acts as a frame for a tapestry rather than one for a picture or a play.^174(*)

Deleuze goes on to say that the difference is between two conceptions of off-screen space:

All framing determines an off-screen space [out-of-field]. There are not two types of frame only one of which would refer to the space off-screen [out-of-field]; there are rather two very different aspects of the off-screen space [out-of-field], each of which refers to a mode of framing.^175(*)

In Jean Renoir's La Règle du Jeu (1939), the space present on the screen is constantly crossed by characters moving in and out of frame. They talked to each other from on or off-screen space alike, so that the portion of space the spectator actually sees is in constant interaction with the portion he cannot, thus enforcing the impression of a larger world of which only a small portion happens to be on the screen.

In a Hitchcock composition, the space of the action is always inscribed very precisely within the frame. Each movement of the characters is not only furthering the action but is also signifying it at a symbolic level thus reinforcing the sense of cohesion or, as the case may be, disintegration. In the scene from Suspicion for instance, after Lina has closed the door on the two inspectors, she stands in the hall, emotionally trapped in the realms of her suspicions. This is the narrative situation however it is also signified in the composition of the frame: Lina stands alone, diminished by a high angle shot, in the projected shadows of the skylight over the hall which form web-like patterns. The composition thus echoes the meaning of the action in a symbolic order.^176(*) When a gap is opened in the composition, the Picasso painting of Benson for instance, it is somewhat like a slip of the tongue in an otherwise controlled speech.

This difference in the framing also has implications over the sense of place. In the Hitchcock example, the place is a direct emanation of the characters; they complement and echo each other. The existence of the place is borne out of the action. Whereas in Renoir's La Règle du Jeu, places are given a presence extending beyond the action. The characters never quite settle into the frame, always on their way somewhere else, on the contrary the places give a sense of permanence; be it a luxurious house in Paris, a countryside mansion or the surrounding woods, they will be there when the action has moved on.

For instance, the scene where the car is seen crashing on the side of the road is followed by a static shot of a stretch of grass. While the spectator hears, off-screen, the voices of André Jurieu and Octave approaching, the on-screen space remains empty for several seconds before the characters fill the frame and stop to argue. This composition of on-screen space and the off-screen sound emphasizes the sense that the characters are only passing through. Their actions happen to coincide with certain places, but there is no sense of belonging.^177(*)

These examples show how the film, through its framing and montage, relates to the world. How the content can be firmly encapsulated into the form, or the form opened so as to accommodate a fluctuating content. The use of the off-screen space as well as a sense of place exceeding its strict narrative function can be ways to disrupt the classical equilibrium. The viewer is permitted to move in a more complex representation, which does not pretend to resolve everything. As Stephen Heath concludes:

Which is to say, finally, that radical disturbance [...] can only be effectively grasped as a work that operates at the expense of the classical suppositions of «form» and «content» in cinema, posing not autonomies but contradictions in the process of film and its narrative-subject binding.^178(*)

3

Also anti-humanist in character was the abolition of the balance between body and soul, mind and matter. The precept sequere naturam amounted to the principle of mens sana in corpore sano that is to say, equilibrium between mind and body; aesthetically it implied the perfect equilibrium of form and content, the total absorption of content in form. In the new art that broke with the principles of the Renaissance and of humanism the content bursts through, shatters and distorts.^179(*)

Arnold Hauser, Mannerism.

In Lynch on Lynch, David Lynch talks about the filming process: how it is only when all the elements are together that things start to happen.^180(*) He often insists on the process of action and reaction:

It's action and reaction all the way along, so the film's never finished till it's finished. It's always a work-in-progress until the very end.^181(*)

The form is not pre-determinated to accommodate a given content; both grow and evolve together. The meaning is never settled before it has taken form. This approach is echoed by the following comment in Film Theory:

As with Freud's insistence that the meaning of a dream resides in the dreamwork, that there is no meaning prior to its formalisation, so here form and content are seen to be inseparable.^182(*)

Given the importance of dreams in Lynch's films, the comparison is particularly resonant. This method of working gives his films an organic feel, not in the sense of a unified organism, but rather as if the parts were an organic matter growing out of each other.

The whole formed by the film often seems like an unfinished process, as if it could expand further. This may come from Lynch's conception of a film as a world to get lost in. As Lynch described his filmic process to Chris Rodley, he recounts the Eraserhead experience:

You've got to be in that world. That's why Eraserhead was so beautiful for me because I was able to sink into that world and live there. There was no other world. I hear songs sometimes that people say were popular at the time, and I haven't a clue, and I was there. And that's the most beautiful thing - to get lost in a world.^183(*)

This desire to get lost in a world may have been the incentive to do a television series. The possibility to go on forever is evoked by David Lynch when speaking about Twin Peaks:

Tony knew that I've never liked having to bend my movie scripts to an end halfway through. On a series you can keep having beginnings and middles and develop story forever.^184(*)

The same idea appears in another quote in Michel Chion's David Lynch: `I liked the idea of a story in episodes that would go on for a long time.'^185(*) Upon which Chion establishes:

In Twin Peaks Lynch is able to evolve unusual dimensions to the story more naturally than in many of his other films because the series offers the possibility of gradually drawing the spectator into a different world. [...] Television is a room-sized medium whose limitations in screen size and sound are compensated for by a larger duration: `Television is all telephoto lens where cinema is wide-angle. In movies you can play a symphony whereas on television you just get a grating sound. The only advantage is that the grating can be continuous.'^186(*)

Chion also points out that Lynch's films often feel tight within the limitation in length of the commercial film of cinema even though most of his films run beyond two hours.

The appeal to make television series remained with Lynch after Twin Peaks, unfortunately none of his other projects extended beyond a few episodes. On the Air (1992) which reiterated the collaboration, initiated for Twin Peaks, with Mark Frost, was cancelled after the seventh episode for lack of audience, and Hotel Room (1992) did not survive its pilot.^187(*) His latest attempt in the field of television series, Mulholland Drive, could have ended up as an unfinished pilot for ABC networks, if it had not been rescued by Studiocanal productions and transformed, with added material, into a feature length film.^188(*)

If Lynch's films are generally a world on their own, Mulholland Drive is particularly so. It may be because of its origin as the pilot of a series; the film seems to concentrate in 146 minutes, the potential for a multi season series. Many scenes in Mulholland Drive may have been conceived as beginnings for stories to be developed later, however in the feature film they form an accumulation of details adding up to a substantial and complex world expanding well beyond what the viewer is given to see.

The two-time production of the film - first as pilot and then as feature film - is projected in the two parts construction of the film. A first part corresponding to the pilot and the second, to the material added for the film. This structure has been interpreted quite literally by some reviewers. It is not that simple, however, and the film is a good example of Lynch's method of working with the accident. Talking about the texture of paint and the artificiality of the brush, he said to Chris Rodley:

After you make a whole bunch of brush strokes, it's something else. It's not the paint talking; it's too much of the person. So you've gotta let accidents and strange things happen - let it work, so it's got an organic sort of quality.^189(*)

Furthermore, it was not the first time that Lynch worked with a two-part structure for a film, thus as Jared Rapfogel reluctantly concedes, the complexity of the articulation of the two parts far exceeds its production agenda:

He [Lynch] suggests, but only suggests, that the story we've been following is a kind of dream, giving a new weight and significance to what has come before by casting it in retrospect into the realm of idealized fantasy. Without solving the puzzle, he takes the movie to a deeper, darker, and more imaginatively resonant place. I'm reluctant to say that it redeems the whole movie, but by adding a dimension and creating a whole set of relationships and tensions between the two parts, Lynch certainly succeeds in transforming an unresolved and apparently disappointing TV pilot into a film with a shape and a wholeness of its own, a film which is somehow more than the sum of its parts.^190(*)

Lynch had twice before experimented with this type of two-part structure: with Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me and with Lost Highway. The former was composed of a prologue on the Teresa Banks case in Deer Meadow, happening a year before the murder of Laura Palmer. Thus the cut seems to be a rather straightforward time jump. But the film is also a prequel to the series Twin Peaks, so that the prologue is an interface between the series and the second part relating the last days in the life of Laura Palmer. As Michel Chion remarked, the prologue in Deer Meadow is like an inverted Twin Peaks:

The series is part of the film, only turned inside out, as one might expect from Lynch's peculiar sense of humour and distinctive logic. Especially in the first part of the prologue, all the aspects of Twin Peaks are inverted.^191(*)

Chion goes on to oppose, term by term, elements of the series and elements of the prologue of Fire Walk With Me, such as the attitude of the sheriff - so welcoming in Twin Peaks and so hostile in Deer Meadow -to the quality of the coffee - notoriously good in Twin Peaks and either too old or too weak in Deer Meadow - in passing by the status of the victim - the lonely drifter nobody cares about has opposed to the pride of Twin Peaks community: its homecoming queen.^192(*) Thus the interplay between the parts is more complex than it may appear at first. The film was badly received by critics and public alike when it was released, Michel Chion went some way to redeem its qualities, concluding:

He [Lynch] failed, many viewers losing interest in Laura's drama, but it was a glorious failure in which, by way of numerous successfully realised and original scenes, Lynch expanded and extended the cinema from within through its daring narrative structure.^193(*)

And it may be that the potential of this narrative structure is more evident after having been developed by Lynch in subsequent films, so that what may have appear clumsy at the time of the release of Fire Walk With Me is now seen to be deliberate.

Lost Highway followed, although there was a five year gap in-between features. It is also a film in two parts but unlike its predecessor there is not even the semblance of an easy articulation between the two. The film is basically the trajectory of one individual, albeit he changes name and appearance half way through. The film is articulated around the scene of metamorphosis of Fred Madison, played by Bill Pullman into Pete Dayton played by Balthazar Getty. The degree of correlation between the two characters is difficult to establish, Pete Dayton being a quite different person from Fred Madison as well as living in a different area of Los Angeles. So that the two parts seem at first completely disconnected if it was not for the strange scene in the death-row cell where in place of the condemned Fred Madison, the guardians discover in the morning, Pete Dayton, a young mechanic (see Fig. 7).

However a certain number of elements from the first part gradually filtered through: Pete cannot bear to hear Fred's saxophone on the radio, a Mr Eddy is a regular customer and the blonde Alice accompanying him has an uncanny likeness to Fred's wife, Renee. What seemed to be a new beginning is gradually brought around with the multiplication of correlations with the first part; Mr Eddy is Dick Laurent declared dead in the opening sentence of the film, Andy is the mysterious friend of Alice, just as he was Renee's, Renee and Alice are together on a photograph with Mr Eddy and Andy, and after making love in the middle of the desert Pete reverts into Fred. Thierry Jousse has commented that:

Everything in Lost Highway is two-fold, the characters, the situations, the objects, and every element can only be perceived through a network of correlations specific to the film. The spectator is taken into an integrated circuit, an involutive loop inside of which he has to invent his own markers.^194(*)

After this reverted mutation, and the discovery that Alice and Renee are one and the same (in the photograph where they both figured when Pete looked at it, only Renee is still there when the detectives find it) the film accomplishes full circle and the end comes round to the beginning; with Fred announcing into his own interphone that Dick Laurent is dead. In an article by Stephen Pizzello, Lynch's remarks are quoted as follows:

Lynch understands full well that the visceral and often oblique visions presented in Lost Highway may frustrate and even antagonize audiences, but he has often said that he prefers his pictures to remain open to many interpretations. «Stories have tangents; they open up and become different things,» the director maintains. «You can still have a structure, but you should leave room to dream. If you stay true to your ideas, film-making becomes an inside-out, honest kind of process. And if it's an honest thing for you, there's a chance that people will feel that, even if it's abstract.»^195(*)

After making The Straight Story, Lynch comes back to a two-part structure with Mulholland Drive. The film has echoes from the correlations systems of both Fire Walk With Me and Lost Highway.

As Fire Walk With Me, the second part is a sort of inverted image of the first part. Diane is the inverted image of Betty, or her remains as interpreted by Martha Nochimson:

Diane Selwyn, the detritus that remains after Betty's immersion in the Roquean darkness of depleted imaginative vision, inhabits a room desaturated of colour: we have found the trembling figure of the main title and know it to be the defeat of Betty's initial possibilities.^196(*)

Diane's grim world comes as a pendant to the sunny one of Betty. But like Lost Highway the film is articulated around the transformation of the main character, even though Diane retains Betty's appearance and both are played by Naomi Watts. The two parts of film are divided by a waking up scene where various times seem to adjust themselves. The nearly similar images of the rotting corpse of Diane Selwyn in the first part (Lyssie Powell) and the sleeping body of Naomi Watts' Diane, quickly succeed each other, punctuated by the «cow-boy» appearance in the bedroom doorway saying: `Hey pretty girl time to wake up'. So even if it is not as literal as in Lost Highway it is a metamorphosis of sorts (see Fig. 8).

Mulholland Drive also presents a complex system of correlations between the two parts, with a variable degree of alteration affecting the various elements. Some characters remain stable through: the «cow-boy» the Castigliane brothers, the hit-man, Diane's neighbour or Adam; others change name and positions but not their persona: Coco or Camilla Rhode; and elements that change name position and persona: Betty and Rita. As for the Blue Key, it passes from a mysterious triangular key to an ordinary latchkey. The instability of the translation from one part to another make it difficult to ascertain the relationship between the two parts. Rather than a dream/reality relationship they are more like the two intermingled layers of an ever shifting world.

Different from its predecessors, however, Mulholland Drive has a strong symmetrical structure with a number of scenes repeated in both part of the film. The previous Lynch's film with a strong symmetrical structure was Blue Velvet. From the opening triptych of white picket fence/tulips/fire-truck which also closed the film, to the plunging into and coming out of the ear as the signpost of Jeffrey's rite of passage, as well as the regular alternation of scenes with Dorothy and with Sandy, Blue Velvet had a well ordained progression of symmetries and asymmetries.

Thus Mulholland Drive has a series of scene to scene symmetries: Betty first appears with an elderly couple, as a radiant image superimposed over dancing couples, she last appears with Rita in the same surreal radiance; Betty arrives in Los Angeles with the elderly couple, whom she met in the plane, they are seen sniggering at her naivety, and they are still sniggering when they come back at the end as malignant gnomes driving Diane to commit suicide and thus accompany her out of L.A; the credits roll over the slow progression of a Limousine on Mulholland Drive with Rita in the back seat, when the car stops unexpectedly the drivers reveal themselves to be assassins here to kill Rita, toward the end the scene is repeated with Diane in it, and the unexpected stop has been done at the instigation of Camilla to surprise Diane; Betty and Rita go to Winkie after having called the police and they are being served by a waitress named Diane, it is also in Winkie that Diane will meet the hit-man she wants to contract to kill Camilla and they are being served by the same waitress but this time she is named Betty; a scene at Adam's villa, from which he is being kicked off by his wife and her lover, is echoed by a reception in the same villa given by Adam to announce his wedding with Camilla; the tender love making scene between Betty and Rita becomes a provocative and aggressive sex scene between Diane and Camilla. There is also a repetition of certain shots such as the telephone with the red lampshade which is answered by Diane in the second part, as well as some narrative elements responding to each other like the «Sylvia North Story» which is the film Adam is making and happens to be the one which made Camilla Rhode famous but with a different director. The list goes on.

Whereas the classical narrative use symmetries and asymmetries to further the plot while circumventing it, in Mulholland Drive they seem to enter into an endless resonating system. Instead of measuring the exact change effected in between repetition, it seems to spiral off into infinite speculations. The doubling-up of the events sends them into a symbolic realm which does not function as a capping-off of the meaning of the action but to its proliferation. Michel Chion commented on the apparently simple use of the shots in Elephant Man:

The simplicity of the shots, which some could mistake for stiffness and classicism, is thus a way of preserving a mythic dimension. In the Elephant Man, Lynch creates an atmosphere of ritual theatre frozen to the spot.^197(*)

Lynch uses the means of classicism in composition but for another result. No more than the symmetric structure of Blue Velvet conveyed the expected sense of closure - too many problems remained unresolved and Sandy's robin appearing at the kitchen window, who should have been sealing the happy ending, was too strangely artificial to be quite satisfying - does the tight web of repetitions of Mulholland Drive resolves anything. Quite the contrary, the more there are correlations between the two parts, the more the meanings multiply.

Thus the composition of the film is controlled by the strict agency of symmetries, asymmetries, repetitions and differences, but only as an ever mounting tension between the events and thus signalling their irreducibility to a single interpretation.

4

We can also see that the perceptions of our senses, even when clear, must necessarily contain some confused feeling. For since all bodies in the universe are in sympathy, ours receives the impressions of all the others, and although our senses bear relations to everything, it is not possible for our soul to attend to everything in all of its particulars. Thus our confused feelings are the result of a variety of perceptions which is indeed infinite - very like the confused murmur a person hears when approaching the sea-shore, which comes from the putting together of the reverberations of innumerable waves. For if several perceptions do not come together to make one, and there is no one which stands out above all the others, and if they all make impressions which are more or less equally strong and equally capable of catching its attention, the soul can only perceive them confusedly.^198(*)

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics.

The fabric of Lynch's films often feels like a thin membrane easily permeated by elements foreign to its action; moments of eternity slipped in between two shots, glimpses of a space persisting beyond the action, or a sound with no explanation. These elements generally contribute to the impression that the characters do not control their fate, or that it is controlled by something else.

The few seconds too long that the elevator doors took to close on Henry, in Eraserhead, seemed like an eternity because that lapse of time could not be controlled, at least not by Henry. A similar sensation of extended time was felt in Mulholland Drive. When, just after Rita had penetrated Aunt Ruth's apartment, a shot, from Rita's point of view - hidden under the kitchen table - showed the kitchen door, a few seconds before eventually, Aunt Ruth entered the kitchen. The fear of being discovered accentuated the feeling of powerlessness.

There are also instances of the persistence of space after the characters are gone, but not gone because they left the place, but because they were edited out. In Blue Velvet, when the group of Frank's friends are leaving Ben's place, the last shot is on Frank in medium close-up screaming: `Let's fuck! I'll fuck anything that moves!' he then vanishes from the shot, which lasts a few seconds longer with the room emptied out of characters. The usually overpowering presence of Frank is thus undermined, he suddenly appears as a manipulated presence.

There is a strange scene in Mulholland Drive, just after Betty and Rita come back from Club Silencio, where they found the Blue Box. They go into Aunt Ruth's bedroom to try the Blue Key, the camera is following Rita and when she turns around Betty is gone. Rita then tried the key on the Blue Box, which open on a darkness into which she is seemingly absorbed. The Blue Box is seen falling on the carpet. Succeeds a shot of the switch on the wall, and Aunt Ruth enters, checks the room, in perfect order: no hat box on the bed, no Blue Box on the carpet, no traces whatsoever of the presence of Betty and Rita, she switches off the light. It is the same room but it does not seem to be in the same dimension to which Betty and Rita belong; it is the last scene before the waking-up scene.

A peculiarly permeable dimension of Lynch's films is the sound-track. Classically the sound-track is strictly correlated to the image as its audible dimension. This relationship is described by Stephen Heath:

The sound-track is hierarchically subservient to the image-track and its pivot is the voice as the presence of character in frame, a supplement to the dramatization of space, along with the accompanying `sound effects'.^199(*)

But for Lynch the sound-track has its own dimension and he pays careful attention to its elaboration.^200(*) Martha Nochimson describes Lynch approach to sounds:

He is not interested in what the illusionist understands as realistic sound. For him, film sound is not an illusion of a perfect mimesis of sound effects; it's another reflection of the multiple dimensionality of the film frame.^201(*)

Michel Chion pointed out the very personal understanding of sound-track adopted by Lynch for Eraserhead:

However, the force of the film's sound concept lies especially in the absence of any continuity [separation] between the music and its overall atmosphere.^202(*)

Thus the sound-track is often permeated by sounds which either have no visible source or are out of proportion in relation to that source. The latter type of sounds is often associated with a dysfunctional electrical installation, which is pointed out by Chris Rodley in interview with Lynch:

Many scenes in your films feature the failure of electricity: the faulty neons in the autopsy room in Twin Peaks; the buzzing light fittings in Dorothy Vallens' apartment block in Blue Velvet, for example. Electrical currents also seem to announce imminent danger or revelation, as in the strobe-light effect you use constantly in Twin Peaks. [...] Electricity becomes linked with the inexplicable.^203(*)

To this list could be added the electrical atmosphere of the trailer park of Deer Meadow in Fire Walk With Me, or the buzzing light punctuating the meeting between Adam and the Cow-boy in Mulholland Drive.

There are also sounds which have no visible sources, often a wind or a breathing sound. Like in the aerial shots of Los Angeles in Mulholland Drive, or in Twin Peaks, where it often seems to be more than an ordinary wind agitating the branches of the Douglas firs. But it is probably in Lost Highway that the use of unexplained sounds is pushed furthest.

5

The infinite present in the finite self is exactly the position of baroque equilibrium or disequilibrium.^204(*)

Gilles Deleuze, The Fold Leibniz and the Baroque.

The first part of Lost Highway is imbued by a sense of unease. Various elements are combined to convey that particular atmosphere, not the least of them is the sound-track. Fred Madison's part of the sound-track is dominated by a constant humming sound, which varies in intensity, sometimes so low the spectator is barely aware of it, but always present. When the sound stops, the feeling of release felt at the beginning of the second part confirms its otherwise omnipotent presence. Lynch explains how it was done in Lynch on Lynch:

Chris Rodley: Fred and Renee's house is full of deep rumbles, like an imminent Los Angeles earthquake - trouble from the very core of the planet.

David Lynch: Right. There's one channel of the six-tracks that's going to the subwoofer. There's so much power there, and it gets all that low stuff. There's an uneasiness there. You've gotta keep pushing the pressure, but you can't abuse it.^205(*)

Because this first part is seen from Fred's point of view and that the sound seems to respond to his emotional states, it feels that it is coming from inside his head; the sound becomes louder as Fred's confusion is increased. It is as if a constant pressure was bearing down on him, and, as he is unable to find a release for it, it eventually reshapes him. The low sound suddenly reaches full intensity during the metamorphosis scene.

Thus if Lynch's films are not a sealed container, but are constantly permeated by other possible dimension, these are not of a reflexive nature nor an attempt to introduce a sense of real space and time. What is beyond is still part of Lynch's world; it is part of the multi-dimensional aspect of his film-worlds. What is confusedly perceived in the gaps, is not so much an impression of the reality beyond the narration, but rather another dimension of Lynch's world: a presence enveloping the world of the characters - maybe waiting to take shape, to accomplish the act of becoming.

* ¹⁴⁹ Wölfflin, Principles, p. 124.

* ¹⁵⁰ Aumont, Bergala, Marie and Vernet, Aesthetics of Film, p. 38. `Ainsi, sous son aspect original, celui d'une technique spécialisée parmi d'autres, le montage se ramène à trois grandes opérations: sélection, assemblage, raccordement - ces trois opérations ayant pour finalité d'obtenir, à partir des éléments au départ séparés, une totalité qui est le film.' Esthétique du Film, Poitiers: Editions Fernand Nathan, 1983, p. 38.

* ¹⁵¹ Ibid., p. 38. `l'objet sur lequel s'exerce le montage, ce sont les plans d'un film (soit, pour expliciter encore: le montage consiste à manipuler des plans en vue de constituer un autre objet, le film).', Editions Fernand Nathan, p. 38.

* ¹⁵² Ibid., p. 45. `Le montage est le principe qui régit l'organisation d'éléments filmiques visuels et sonores, ou d'assemblages de tels éléments, en les juxtaposant, en les enchaînant, et/ou en réglant leur durée.', Editions Fernand Nathan, p. 44.

* ¹⁵³ Ibid., p. 45. `Bien entendu répétons que cet élargissement n'a d'intérêt que dans une perspective théorique et analytique.', Editions Fernand Nathan, p. 44.

* ¹⁵⁴ Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1, p. 29. `Eisenstein ne cesse de rappeler que le montage, c'est le tout du film, l'Idée.', Cinéma 1, p. 46.

* ¹⁵⁵ Ibid., p. 30. `La composition des images-mouvement, Griffith l'a conçue comme une organisation, un organisme, une grande unité organique. Ce fut sa découverte. L'organisme est d'abord une unité dans le divers, c'est-à-dire un ensemble de parties différenciées. [...] Il faut encore que les parties agissent et réagissent les unes sur les autres, à la fois pour montrer comment elles entrent en conflit et menacent l'unité de l'ensemble organique, et comment elles surmontent le conflit ou restaurent l'unité.' Cinéma 1, p. 47-48.

* ¹⁵⁶ Stephen Heath, Questions of Cinema, p. 43.

* ¹⁵⁷ Ibid., p. 43-44.

* ¹⁵⁸ Ibid., p. 54.

* ¹⁵⁹ Lapsley and Westlake, Film theory, p. 141.

* ¹⁶⁰ Ibid., p. 137.

* ¹⁶¹ Heath, op. cit., p. 19-20.

* ¹⁶² Ibid., p. 20.

* ¹⁶³ Lapsley and Westlake, op. cit., p. 148.

* ¹⁶⁴ Ibid., p. 148

* ¹⁶⁵ Heath, op. cit., p. 21.

* ¹⁶⁶ Ibid., p. 23.

* ¹⁶⁷ Ibid., p. 24.

* ¹⁶⁸ Noël Burch, Theory of Film Practice, trans. Lane, Helen, London Secker & Warburg, London, 1983.

p. 142.

* ¹⁶⁹ Lapsley and Westlake, op. cit., p. 155.

* ¹⁷⁰ Wölfflin, Principles, p. 135.

* ¹⁷¹ Noël Burch, op. cit., p. xviii.

* ¹⁷² Aumont, Bergala, Marie and Vernet, op. cit., p. 13. `Le hors-champs est donc essentiellement lié au champ, puisqu'il n'existe qu'en fonction de celui-ci; il pourrait se définir comme l'ensemble des éléments (personnages, décors, etc.) qui, n'étant pas inclus dans le champ, lui sont néanmoins rattachés imaginairement, pour le spectateur, par un moyen quelconque.' Editions Fernand Nathan, p. 15.

* ¹⁷³ Heath, Questions of Cinema, p. 45.

* ¹⁷⁴ Deleuze, Cinema 1, p. 16. `Si l'on reprend l'alternative de Bazin, cache ou cadre, tantôt le cache opère comme un cache mobile suivant lequel tout ensemble se prolonge dans un ensemble homogène plus vaste avec lequel il communique, tantôt comme un cadre pictural qui isole un système et en neutralise l'environnement. Cette dualité s'exprime de manière exemplaire entre Renoir et Hitchcock, l'un pour qui l'espace et l'action excèdent toujours les limites du cadre qui n'opère qu'un prélèvement sur une aire, l'autre chez qui le cadre opère un «enfermement de toutes les composantes», et agit comme un cadre de tapisserie plus encore que pictural ou théâtral.', Cinéma 1, Editions de Minuit, p. 28. Deleuze's use of the term tapestry is explained later in Cinema 1, when he describes Hitchcock's films as a weaving of relations, with the action as the mere mobile shuttle, p. 200.

* ¹⁷⁵ Ibid., p. 16, I replaced the term of out-of-field used in the translation by the term off-screen, since it is more consistent with the term generally used in film theory. `Tout cadrage détermine un hors-champ. Il n'y a pas deux types de cadrage dont l'un seulement renverrait au hors-champs, il y a plutôt deux aspects très différents du hors-champs dont chacun renvoie à un mode de cadrage.' Cinéma 1, p. 29.

* ¹⁷⁶ Heath, op. cit., p. 20-21.

* ¹⁷⁷ Heath analysed at length the composition of a scene in Oshima Nagisa's Death by Hanging, to demonstrate how the framing and montage of scene highlights the sense of displacement of the characters. Op. cit., p. 64-69.

* ¹⁷⁸ Ibid., p. 52.

* ¹⁷⁹ Arnold Hauser, Mannerism, The Crisis of the Renaissance and the Origin of Modern Art, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965, p. 9.

* ¹⁸⁰ `If you're sitting in front of a painting and it's part-way going and it starts talking to you, then you act and react. You're going with a kind of a subconscious intuition kind of thing. And things unfold. It's the same way with a scene in a film: you can have it in the script but when it's in front of you, it's fluid. If a line doesn't work, you adjust it - you see it has to be this way. You see that the light has to be a certain way, the pace has to be a certain way. It's talking to you. Unfortunately, only when all the elements are together does it really talk to you. So you've got to be on your toes. You've got to be on guard. You've got to be in that world. [...] and because of the money and the pressure now, it's almost like a catastrophe. Making pictures has gotten too fast. Many pictures skim along the surface. They can't delve deep because, if you're water-skiing at fifty miles an hour, you're not going to go beneath the surface. But if the boat stops - or even slows up - down you go in the deep water. And that's where the good ideas are.' Lynch on Lynch, p. 27.

* ¹⁸¹ Lynch on Lynch, p. 234.

* ¹⁸² Lapsley and Westlake, Film Theory, p. 152.

* ¹⁸³ Lynch on Lynch, p. 27.

* ¹⁸⁴ Tad Friend, `Creative Differences', http://www.geocities.com/hollywood/2093/, [16.03.2003].

* ¹⁸⁵ Michel Chion, David Lynch, (BFI), p. 100.

* ¹⁸⁶ Michel Chion, op. cit., p. 103. `Twin Peaks déploie en effet des dimensions insolites avec plus de naturel que certains de ses films de cinéma, à cause de la possibilité qu'une série offre de faire entrer graduellement le spectateur dans un monde différent. [...] La télévision serait donc pour lui un médium de chambre, dont la limitation en ampleur et en polyphonie est compensée par un espace en durée plus large.' Editions Cahiers du Cinéma, p. 122.

* ¹⁸⁷ Michel Chion, David Lynch, Editions Cahiers du Cinéma, 2001, p. 244.

* ¹⁸⁸ Studiocanal is the production unit of the French paying channel Canal +. David Lynch's films have often been partly supported by French productions, such as Ciby 2000, the Bouygues production unit (owner of TF1), for Twin Peaks, Fire Walk with Me and Lost Highway, and Studiocanal for The Straight Story.

* ¹⁸⁹ Lynch on Lynch, p. 17.

* ¹⁹⁰ Jared Rapfogel, `David Lynch', http://www.sensesofcinema.com/, [16.03.2003]

* ¹⁹¹ Michel Chion, David Lynch, (BFI), p. 147-148. `De fait la série est bien dans le film, mais - c'est là l'humour spécial et la logique particulière des auteurs - sous une forme retournée. Notamment dans la première partie du prologue, inversion de tout ce qui faisait Twin Peaks.' Cahiers du Cinéma, p. 173.

* ¹⁹² Ibid., pp. 147-149.

* ¹⁹³ Ibid., p. 155.

* ¹⁹⁴ Thierry Jousse, `Lost Highway', my translation: `Le jeu de dualités, de résonances, d'échos qui constituent le fond même du film ne dit pas autre chose. Tout est double dans Lost Highway les personnages, les situations, les objets, et chaque élément ne peut être perçu qu'en fonction d'un réseau de correspondances propre au film. Le spectateur est pris dans un circuit intégré, une boucle involutive a l'intérieur de laquelle il doit créer ses propres repères.'

* ¹⁹⁵ Stephen Pizzello, `Highway to Hell', American Cinematographer, Vol. LXXVIII, No. 3, March 1997, p. 42.

* ¹⁹⁶ Martha Nochimson, `«All I need is the girl»: The Life and Death of Creativity in Mulholland Drive' in The Cinema of David Lynch, American Dreams, Nightmare Visions, p. 178.

* ¹⁹⁷ Michel Chion, David Lynch, (BFI), p. 58. `Ce que certains peuvent prendre pour de la raideur et du classicisme - cette simplicité des plans - est donc une manière de préserver une dimension mythique. Lynch crée ainsi, dans Elephant Man, une atmosphère de théâtre rituelle, en sur-place.' Cahiers du Cinéma, p. 74.

* ¹⁹⁸ Leibniz, Gottfried, Wilhelm, Philosophical Texts, trans. Woolhouse, R.S. and Richard Francks, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. p. 85-86.

* ¹⁹⁹ Heath, op. cit., p. 54-55.

* ²⁰⁰ Having found the time usually allowed by the studios for post production much too short, Lynch now has his own sound studio to be able to make his soundtrack at his own pace.

* ²⁰¹ Nochimson, The Passion, p. 36.

* ²⁰² Michel Chion, David Lynch, (BFI), p. 43-44. I replaced «separation» by «continuity» as it was contradicting the sense of the sentence. `Mais la force du concept sonore du film est surtout qu'il n'y a plus de solution de continuité entre ambiance et musique.' Cahiers du Cinéma, p. 54.

* ²⁰³ Chris Rodley, Lynch on Lynch, p. 73. To which Lynch answered: `yeah, but scientists don't understand it. They say, `It's moving electrons.' But there's a certain point where they say, `We don't know why that happens.' I'm not a scientist and I haven't talked to these guys that are into electricity, but it is a force. When electrons run down a wire - do they have that power. It's amazing. How did a plug or an outlet get to be shaped that way? And light bulbs: I can feel these random electrons, you know, hitting me. It's like when you go under power lines. If you were blindfolded, and drove down a highway under those power lines, and really concentrated, you could tell when they occurred. There is something very disturbing about that amount of electricity - they know these things now. A tumour grows in the head.

* ²⁰⁴ Deleuze, The Fold, p. 89. L'infini actuel dans le moi fini, c'est exactement la position d'équilibre, ou de déséquilibre, baroque. Le Pli, p. 119.

* ²⁰⁵ Lynch on Lynch, p. 227.