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

CHAPTER IV:

THE TEXTURE OF FILM

1

In both styles unity is the chief aim, but in the one case unity is achieved by a harmony of free parts, in the other, by a union of parts in a single theme, or by the subordination, to one unconditioned dominant, of all other elements.^206(*)

Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History

In a classical narrative film, the parts of the film are articulated in a clear sequence to highlight the logic of the chain of events. In each scene, each event occupies a distinct position within the clearly distributed narrative structure so as to forward the action to its resolution. What the studio system of production wishes for is to be presented with a film with a clearly laid out plan of all its scenes.

But many successful films, in artistic and/or commercial terms, did not go according to plan - As the stories around some famous «making of» have let known; such as Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola 1979) or Gone With the Wind (Victor Fleming 1939). This is because a film, classic or otherwise, does not actually exist until it is acted out, and many accidents can happen during this process. This is true of every artistic form, however conceptual a work of art, it does not really happen until it is inscribed in matter. It is even more manifest concerning film production; it has to bring together many disparate elements and for the cohesion to happen and make a film, it needs its own momentum which cannot be precisely planned. In as much as the film industry does not encourage this happening of the film, by `talking ideas to death' as Lynch says,<sup>207(*)</sup> independent filmmakers can also be just as limited by their will to control the ideas. This is what Jean-Luc Godard speaks of when he talks of `starting from the camera':

The camera is the true reverse-field of the spotlight, and good films starts from the reverse-field, from the camera. The films I liked in the last years [...] are all films needing the camera, starting from this need, to project what they have to say. Instead, most films starts with the spotlight, by what the filmmakers want to say before it has been shot. They violate the camera, they enslave it to a discourse, they say I am going to shoot that apple because this and that, because such and such said that...^208(*)

In his seminars and writings Deleuze developed upon Leibniz's conception of soul and matter. In a seminar he said that: `The event cannot be inscribed in the soul without, at the same time, demanding a body to mark itself into.'^209(*) For the event to happen, it has to, simultaneously, be actualised in the soul and realised in the matter, before that the event is still in the realm of the possible. This idea implies a dynamic notion of matter, what constitutes its texture is the movement of the event inscribed. Deleuze will thus develop the concept of the fold:

As a general rule the way [manner] a material is folded is what constitutes its texture. It is defined less by its heterogeneous and really distinct parts than by the style [manner] by which they become inseparable by virtue of particular folds.^210(*)

Thus the folds of matter are its texture; through them the creative force is expressed. This idea is summed up by the philosopher John Rajchman in Constructions:

The baroque invents one possibility of fold and texture: there are the textures through which matter becomes «material» and the enfoldings of the soul through which form becomes «force». In the baroque as in Leibniz, the metaphysics of formed matter is replaced by a metaphysics of materials «expressing» forces.^211(*)

Thus if the notion of texture is relevant to this study it is not so much in the tactile sense of the term than for the forces expressed within it. This finds some echoes in the observations Noël Burch made in the introduction to the English edition of his Theory of Film Practice:

A [...] point, especially important to this English-language edition, is that the [...] «technical» aspect of film, to which I give special attention, was most often referred to in the original French as écriture or facture, words that have generally had to be rendered as «style» and «texture». These words must be read as having more precise referents than is generally the case in English, always implying as they do to specifically material options of a «technical» nature (facture means texture in the articulative sense, écriture is graphic inscription as much as «style»).^212(*)

This chapter is concentrating on the texture of film and how Lynch's ideas have become inscribed within the very fabric of the film.

2

The broad forms of the baroque style are part of a totally new conception of matter, that is of the ideal aspect of matter, which gives expression to the inner vitality, and behaviour of the members. [...] As matter becomes soft and masses fluid, structural cohesion is dissolved; the massiveness of the style, already expressed in the broad and heavy forms, is now also manifested in inadequate articulation and lack of precise forms.^213(*)

Heinrich Wölfflin, Renaissance and Baroque

Ideas for Lynch are never an abstract term. He has often explained how his ideas are always accompanied by sensations, as in this quote in Stephen Pizzello's review of Lost Highway:

`Everything sort of follows my initial ideas', he offers. `As soon as I get an idea, I get a picture and a feeling, and I can even hear sounds. The mood and the visuals are very strong. Every single idea I have comes with these things'.^214(*)

Lynch further develops his conception of ideas in Lynch on Lynch:

Ideas are the best things going. Somewhere there's all the ideas, and they're sitting there and once in a while one bob up and the idea is made known suddenly. Something is seen and known and felt all at once, and along with it comes a burst of enthusiasm and you fall in love with it.^215(*)

But to be able to inscribe these ideas it is necessary to remain close to the associated sensations, otherwise the idea might be lost altogether, as he further explains:

And you've gotta be true to them because they're bigger than you first think they are. They're almost like gifts, and even if you don't understand them a hundred per cent, if you're true to them, they'll ring true at different levels. But if you alter them too much they won't even ring; they'll just sort of clank.^216(*)

And this is where the notion of mood becomes important, it is in the mood of a scene that the feel of an idea can manifest itself; the mood of a scene will dictate the use of lighting as much as it gives the rhythm to the acting. The mood is something Lynch is sensitive to in other filmmakers' films. Richard Combs has quoted Lynch saying; `«I love Rear Window because it has such a mood and even though I know what's going to happen, I love being in that room and feeling that time. It's like I can smell it...» (Hollywood Reporter, October 6, 1986).'^217(*)

Lynch's sensory approach to film is echoed by other critical response such as in this review saying that Eraserhead was a movie `to be experienced rather than explained'^218(*). On Blue Velvet Charles Drazin remarked:

In Blue Velvet there is an intensity of perception, a looking for its own sake, that reaches beyond the surface of things. This compulsion to see has its unsavoury aspect, relishing, as it does, the bad every bit as much as the good [...] Lynch use texture, like sound and music to convey mood, it is a way of getting under the skin of the characters.^219(*)

About Lost Highway Thierry Jousse pointed out how the sensory and rhythmic aspects of film took precedence over the narrative logic:

Signs float and do not join each other. The story looses its pre-eminence to fill a function essentially rhythmic or atmospheric. [...] Lynch is looking for an hyper-sensorial contact with his viewer, he aims to bring him to a particular state of receptivity, where he will simultaneously loose his footing and find a new relationship with excessively subtle perceptions flux, which of course are close from those possible to reach through drugs. It is the musical or ceremonial function of directing.^220(*)

In his kit on Lynch's key terms, Michel Chion made an entry on the way David Lynch used texture in the wider sense:

For Lynch, the notion of texture has a very personal meaning, although it appears almost universal judging by the countless different contexts in which he refers to it. Texture, as he tries to present it in his films, involves superimposing different layers and levels of multiple meanings. In a broader sense, texture denotes the aspect of a surface or a skin, its patterns, its grain, micro-reliefs which appear whenever one erases words. In this second sense, texture refers to the idea of a fragment from the natural continuum, a close-up on the dress of nature.^221(*)

Thus Lynch's films develop from ideas which manifest themselves through sensations which come together to form a mood. The mood is the sensual manifestation of the idea. It is in the accumulation of details and resonance that this mood is conveyed through light, sounds, colors, surfaces, faces, words and so on. Lynch's films proceed through accumulation rather than progression. This approach is echoed in Brian O'Doherty's essay on Citizen Kane:

The Baroque treats detail as a relative point, a relay in a larger scheme; it crowds details into clusters that themselves become units in another larger scheme as it telescopes upward; it fakes architecture, favors multiple viewpoints, plays with illusion. It is a perceptual storm around a concept.^222(*)

3

Life is not only everywhere, but souls are everywhere in matter. Thus when an organism is called to unfold its own parts, its animal or sensitive soul is opened onto an entire theatre in which it perceives or feels according to its unity, independently of its organism yet inseparable from it.^223(*)

Gilles Deleuze, The Fold, Leibniz and the Baroque

Lynch gives a precise attention to the cinematography of his films. The format and the sharpness of the image reinforce the presence of the visual element of the film. In her review of Blue Velvet, Pauline Kael described her first impressions of the film:

At the beginning, the wide images, (the film is shot in Cinemascope ratio: 2.35 to 1) are meticulously bright and sharp-edged; you feel that you're seeing every detail of architecture, the layout of homes and apartments, the furnishing and potted plants, the women's dresses. [...] Later the light is low, but all through this movie the colours are insistent, objects may suddenly be enlarged to fill the frame, and a tiny imagined sound may be amplified to a thunderstorm. The style may be described as hallucinatory clinical realism.^224(*)

Further on, referring to the sensory aspect of the cinematography, Kael wrote: `real streets look like paintings you could touch - you feel as if you could moosh your fingers in the colors'.^225(*) Thus the quality of the image emphasizes the perceptual presence of textures.

Lynch's films are generally associated with one particular texture which opens the film as remarked by Michel Chion:

Very early on, Lynch acquired the habit of opening his films, in the credits or just afterwards, with moving textures which associate the film with a certain material or substance.^226(*)

The texture thus provides a sort of introductory theme to the film which will reappears at interval as an undertone. In Blue Velvet, for instance, the blue velvet theme appears at different levels. First, it is the texture of the undulating surface over which the opening credits rolls. Then, it is the song: Lynch declares in Lynch on Lynch, that it was the Bobby Vinton's version of the song Blue Velvet, `that sparked the movie'.^227(*) And thus it plays on the soundtrack over the opening shots of the film. The song resounds again, but this time sung live by Dorothy in the Slow Club. And it is as her bathrobe that the texture of the opening shapes itself into of which a piece has been cut out and is later seen in Franck's hands; as a sexual accessory. Ultimately the cut out piece will be found stuck into the mouth of a dead man.

As a song, Blue Velvet evokes the softness of the night with its mysteries and fascinations and thus immediately overlay the sunny images of Lumberton with a darker undertone. The song is heard again in this version by Bobby Vinton when Jeffrey goes up the stairs to return to Dorothy's apartment the second time, filled with erotic possibilities.

As a material, the blue velvet can have different functions, as remarked by Pauline Kael about the unpretentiousness of the film: `Even that fetishized blue velvet robe is tacky, like something you could pick up in the red brick department on Main Street.'^228(*) The texture could serve as a reality check to the alluring lyrics of the song. As Franck's tool, the blue velvet is used first for a brutal sex scene and then for a murder and thus could be the other side of the glamour the song promised.

When Chris Rodley asked David Lynch what enticed him to do Dune, he answered: `I thought about waves - water waves, sand waves, waves motion, symbols, repetition of shapes, connecting threads.'^229(*) Thus the opening credits for Dune roll on waves of sand with a full orchestral score. However, as Michel Chion pointed out, Lynch did not manage to integrate the sand into the film:

In the credits of Dune, there are, of course, sand dunes and the wind raising curtains of sand, but curiously, this texture does not play a significant part in the rest of the film.^230(*)

Wild at Heart is placed under the sign of fire, with the theme playing visually and narratively. The credits are impressive as Michel Chion describes them:

The spiralling flames in the credits of Wild at Heart, accompanied by the orchestral music of Richard Strauss, are grandiose and theatricalised. They announce the film's leitmotiv, fire, associated with the power of sex.^231(*)

The presence of fire will appear as two sets of images, the image-memory of Lula's house burning and the close up of matches and cigarettes Sailor and Lula smoke after having sex. Martha Nochimson analysed these two aspects:

The fire in the film is, of course, a relatively banal narrative element through which Marietta rids herself of her husband Clyde when Santos sets him aflame and burns down their home. Images of this fire that haunt Lula's memory are also flatly narrative as the vehicle for her understanding of her mother's crime. But when we see greatly magnified close-up shots of matches being struck, we are shown that fire is also a visceral image of consuming, wilfully imposed acceleration of the air to intense movement and color that occupies a part of the border where will compresses space and time into holocaust.^232(*)

The Straight Story opens on a `striated texture, which reveals itself to be the furrows of a field, shot from an helicopter,'^233(*) as formulated by Chion. We will find echoes of these furrows in the wrinkles on Alvin's face magnified in close up. The deeply ridged fields also resemble the film's journey into memories. The fields and Alvin's wrinkles occupy most of the film space, thus tending to associate one with the other, by assimilation.

These textures are played out like the main theme of one particular film. Other textures are more of a recurring motif through Lynch's films. He confesses his attraction to strange textures to Chris Rodley:

I'm obsessed with textures. We're surrounded by so much vinyl that I found myself constantly in pursuit of others textures. One time I used some hair remover to remove all fur from a mouse to see what it looked like - and it looked beautiful.^234(*)

Lynch is particularly attracted to organic decay or putrefaction, letting his camera linger on some gruesome sight, quite oddly beautiful. In Fire Walk With Me, during the scene in the morgue of Deer Meadow, there is a long painful shot of Sam Stanley picking a letter from under the nail of Teresa Banks. The flesh of the nail is seen in extreme close-up as Sam removes the nail.

In Mulholland Drive just after Joe, the hit-man, has fire a bullet through the head of Ed, another hit-man, it is a bemused camera which seems to contemplate the odd phenomenon of the hair and blood immobilised horizontally on the bullet trajectory. In the same film, in a less comical vein, Betty and Rita discover the body of Diane Selwyn putrefied on her bed, which is shown just long enough to let the viewer's imagination fills in the details. The list goes on.

Through its decay the human body is thus firmly linked to matter. This presence of the organic is balanced by another of Lynch's favourite textures: smoke. All types of smoke as accounted for by Michel Chion:

The pulsing smoke of Eraserhead, the powerful smoke of The Elephant Man, the decorative an unfortunately too intermittent smoke of the planet Giedi

Prime in Dune; the straight columns of smoke like those of the sawmill in the credits of Twin Peaks, or the small atomic mushroom punctuating John Merrick's birth and then his return to the great whole in The Elephant Man. Smoke, obscure and diffuse, is life.^235(*)

Michel Chion further quotes Lynch explaining his fascination for factories:

I was raised on very ecological principles. To me factories are symbols of creation, with the same organic processes as in nature. I like soot, smoke and dust.^236(*)

On one hand, smoke is associated with productive machine activity; on the other it reveals a more ethereal sort of presence. In The Elephant Man, if smoke is present as a manifestation of the industrial age, it is also an almost ectoplasmic presence assisting his birth and death. This sense of presence is felt in other instances such as when the cabin is burning in Lost Highway the heavy volutes of smoke seems to emanate from more than just the burning of wood.^237(*) In Mulholland Drive, it is from an extremely convoluted cloud of smoke that Rita emerges from the crashed car, and into another that Diane is absorbed as she collapses onto her bed, after shooting herself with a bullet to the head.

Smoke seems to be the sign of, either mechanical activities or, the presence of forces having a hand in human affairs. These motifs are also found in the aural texture of Lynch's films, which is given as careful an attention as the visuals. Ron Magid commented on the sound-track of Blue Velvet:

Blue Velvet draws much of its powerful mood from the eerie noises that subtly fill Alan Splett's sound design, and this film marks Lynch's fourth feature film collaboration with this fine artist. For Lynch, who seems to hear his movies rather than see them, the Blue Velvet soundtrack grew naturally from the dictates of each film's scenes, `The material dictates the mood and it also dictates the sound,» he explains. «We tried to get the sound that make the right mood and it's so simple, it's so logical. The rest is just trial and error in the blending of those things, and it has to be just right, but you know it when it isn't.'^238(*)

Certain sounds have become a sort of Lynch trade-mark such as the sound of machinery. It is already present in Eraserhead, like a pulsation for the whole film. The thumping sounds of industrial machinery is the heart of the city in The Elephant Man, and the lower in the depth of the city Frederick Treves goes, the louder the beat. The animality of these sounds is observed by Pauline Kael about the staircase of Blue Velvet:

There are noises in there, of course, and Alan Splet, who started working with Lynch when he was doing shorts and has been his sound man on all his features, combines them so that, say, when Jeffrey walks up the seven flights to Dorothy's apartment the building has a pumping, groaning sound. It could be an ancient furnace of foghorns or a heavy old animal that's winded.^239(*)

Michel Chion remarked on the sound of the electric fan in Fire Walk with Me:

It is one of those machine sounds with an implacable regularity which are omnipresent in Lynch's work. Their meaning is neither erotic nor sexual as such, nor can they be reduced to some primary function. They are life itself, vital power, absurd and ever-present.^240(*)

However, the electric fan of Fire Walk With Me is at the threshold between the thumping, pulsating sounds and another type: the electrical sound. The electrical sound is rather linked with dysfunction and supernatural presence than organic life. It can be an erratic neon tube, or just from the current going along power lines; they send buzzing, crackling sounds into the air.

In his later films, Lynch seems to have developed lower sounds, more felt than heard. Pulsating in the air they have no beat or buzz just a vibration. It is Lynch's approach to room tone:

I'm real fascinated by presences - what you call `room tone'. It's the sound that you hear when there's silence, in between words or sentences. It's a tricky thing, because in this seemingly kind of quiet sound, some feelings can be brought in, and a certain kind of picture of a bigger world can be made. And all those things are important to make that world.^241(*)

This low drone was particularly present in Lost Highway, in the Madison's house. But they are also permeating the air of aunt Ruth's apartment in Mulholland Drive, although on a softer mode. It gives the apartment a muffled atmosphere, as if no scream could ever tear through it.

Thus Lynch uses certain sounds just as he uses visual textures, as elements intimately woven into the fabric of the film and contributing to its atmosphere as much as to its meaning.

4

A Baroque conception of matter, in philosophy as in science or in art, has to go up to this point, to a texturology that attests to a generalized organicism, or to a ubiquitous presence of organisms.242(*)

* ²⁰⁶ Wölfflin, Principles, p. 15.

* ²⁰⁷ Lynch on Lynch, p. 27.

* ²⁰⁸ Jean-Luc Godard, `Juste une conversation' avec Jean-Michel Frodon, Cahiers du Cinéma, No. 590, May 2004, p.21, my translation: `La caméra est le véritable contrechamp du projecteur, et les bons films partent du contrechamp, de la caméra. Les films que j'ai aimés, au cours de ces dernières années, [...] sont tous des films qui ont besoin de la caméra, qui partent de ce besoin, pour projeter ce qu'ils ont à dire. Alors que la quasi-totalité des films commence par le projecteur, par ce que les cinéastes veulent déjà dire avant d'avoir été filmés. Ils violent la caméra, ils l'asservissent à un discours, ils disent: je vais filmer cette pomme parce que ceci et cela, parce qu'un tel a dit que...'

* ²⁰⁹ Gilles Deleuze, seminar on Leibniz, 19.05.1987, my translation: `L'événement ne peut pas s'inscrire dans l'âme sans en même temps réclamer un corps dans lequel il se trace.'

* ²¹⁰ Gilles Deleuze, The Fold, p. 36. I inserted in bracket the word manner since it seemed closer to the French word manière and as it introduces the notion further developed by Deleuze of Mannerism. `En règle générale, c'est la manière dont une matière se plie qui constitue sa texture: elle se définit moins par ses parties hétérogènes et réellement distinctes que par la manière dont celles-ci deviennent inséparables en vertu de plis particuliers.' Le Pli, p. 51.

* ²¹¹ John Rajchman, Constructions, Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1998, p. 14.

* ²¹² Noël Burch, Theory of Film Practice, p. xviii.

* ²¹³ Wölfflin, Renaissance and Baroque, p. 46.

* ²¹⁴ Stephen Pizzello, `Highway to Hell' p. 35

* ²¹⁵ Lynch on Lynch, p. 48.

* ²¹⁶ Ibid., p. 49.

* ²¹⁷ Richard Combs, `Crude Thought & Fierce Forces', Monthly Film Bulletin, Vol. LVI, No. 639, April 1987, p. 104.

* ²¹⁸ Quoted by Chris Rodley, in Lynch on Lynch, p.54.

* ²¹⁹ Charles Drazin, Blue Velvet, p. 153.

* ²²⁰ Thierry Jousse, `Lost Highway', my translation: `Les signes flottent et ne se raccordent plus les uns aux autres. Le récit n'est plus au premier plan mais a essentiellement une fonction rythmique ou climatique. [...] Lynch cherche un contact hyper-sensoriel avec son spectateur, il travaille à le mettre dans un certain état de réceptivité, lui faisant simultanément perdre pied et trouver une nouvelle relation avec des flux de perception excessivement subtils, qui s'apparentent bien sur à ceux qu'il est possible d'atteindre par l'intermédiaire d'une drogue. C'est la fonction musicale ou cérémoniale de la mise en scène.'

* ²²¹ M. Chion, David Lynch, BFI, p. 195-196. `La notion de texture revêt un sens très personnel chez Lynch, Presque universel aussi, à entendre celui-ci l'invoquer dans des contextes si divers. Il appelle texture la superposition de différentes couches, de niveaux de significations multiples, comme il essaie de la réaliser dans ses films. Mais aussi dans un sens plus répandu, c'est l'aspect d'une surface ou d'une peau, ses motifs, sa granulation, ses micro-reliefs, apparaissent comme tels lorsqu'on efface les mots. Dans ce deuxième sens, la texture renvoie à l'idée d'un fragment du continuum naturel- d'un gros plan sur la robe de la nature.' Editions Cahiers du Cinéma, p. 233.

* ²²² Brian O'Doherty, `Kane's Welles', p. 89.

* ²²³ Deleuze, The Fold, p. 11. `Il n'y a pas seulement du vivant partout, mais des âmes partout dans la matière. Alors, quand un organisme est appelé à déplier ses propres parties, son âme animale ou sensitive s'ouvre à tout un théâtre, dans lequel elle perçoit et ressent d'après son unité, indépendamment de son organisme, et pourtant inséparable.', Le Pli, p. 16-17.

* ²²⁴ Pauline Kael, Hooked, Film Writings 1985-1988, London-New York: Marion Boyars, 1992, p. 203.

* ²²⁵ Ibid., p. 207.

* ²²⁶ Michel Chion, David Lynch, BFI, p. 196. ` Très vite Lynch a pris le pli d'ouvrir ses films - avec le générique ou juste après - sur des textures mouvantes, qui mettent le film sous le signe d'une certaine matière ou d'une substance.' Editions Cahiers du Cinéma, p.233.

* ²²⁷ Lynch on Lynch, p. 134. `It was the song that sparked the movie! Bernie Wayne wrote that song in the early fifties. I forget who sung it first, but it wasn't Bobby Vinton. But Bobby Vinton's version was the first one I ever heard. I don't know what it was about that song, because it wasn't the kind of music that I really liked. But there was something mysterious about it. It made me think about things. And the first things I thought about were lawns [laughs] - lawns and the neighbourhood. It's twilight - with maybe a streetlight on, let's say, so a lot is in the shadow. And in the foreground is part of a car door, or just a suggestion of a car, because it's too dark to see clearly. But in the car is a girl with red lips. And it was these red lips, blue velvet and these black-green lawns of a neighbourhood that started it.'

* ²²⁸ Pauline Kael, op. cit., p. 207.

* ²²⁹ Lynch in Lynch on Lynch, p. 113-114.

* ²³⁰ Michel Chion, David Lynch, BFI, p. 196. `Dans Dune, sur le générique, ce sont évidement les dunes du désert ou le vent soulève des rideaux de sable - mais curieusement, cette texture ne joue pas de rôle significatif dans la suite du film, où Lynch s'intéresse surtout au bois, au métal et au cuir des décors intérieur.' Editions Cahiers du Cinéma, p.233.

* ²³¹ Ibid., `Les volutes de flamme du générique de Sailor et Lula, grandioses et théâtralisées, sur l'orchestre de Richard Strauss, annoncent le leitmotiv du film, le feu, associé à la puissance du sexe.', Editions Cahiers du Cinéma, p. 233.

* ²³² Martha Nochimson, The Passion, p.64.

* ²³³ Michel Chion, David Lynch, Editions Cahiers du Cinéma 2001, p. 254, my translation: `Ici, c'est une texture striée, qui se révèle être les sillons d'un champ, filmé d'hélicoptère.'

* ²³⁴ Lynch on Lynch, p. 23.

* ²³⁵ Michel Chion, David Lynch, BFI, p. 192. `Fumées pulsantes d'Eraserhead, fumées enveloppantes et puissantes d'Elephant Man, fumées (trop intermittentes malheureusement et décoratives) de la planète Giedi Prime dans Dune. Panaches de fumées en colonnes bien droites, comme au sortir de la scierie quand elle est en activité (générique de la série Twin Peaks), ou petit champignon atomique ponctuant la venue à l'existence de John Merrick, puis son retour au Grand Tout (Elephant Man): les fumées sont la vie, elles sont la vie obscure et confuse.' Cahiers du Cinéma, p. 213.

* ²³⁶ Ibid., p. 192.

* ²³⁷ Lynch is very specific about the smoke he wants, in Lynch on Lynch he talks about some of his photographs: `But then it went one step further: why not just pure smoke? Smoke obscures things. And it's another texture. It seemed like a good combo, so I got a smoke machine from my friend, special effects expert Gary D'Amico. He's got, like, a hundred different smoke machines. I like black smoke, but there's no such thing any more. The only way to really get black smoke is to burn tyres, but it's so toxic it isn't funny.' p. 219.

* ²³⁸ Ron Magid, `Blue Velvet - Small Town Horror Tale', p. 72-74.

* ²³⁹ Pauline Kael, op. cit., p. 207.

* ²⁴⁰ Michel Chion, David Lynch, BFI, p. 150-151.

* ²⁴¹ Lynch on Lynch, p. 72-73.

* ²⁴² Deleuze, The Fold, p. 115. `Une conception Baroque de la matière, en philosophie comme en art, doit aller jusque-la, une texturologie qui témoigne d'un organicisme généralisé ou d'une présence des organismes partout.' Le Pli, p. 155.