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

Gilles Deleuze, The Fold, Leibniz and the Baroque.

Lynch's films also have objects and characters whose function is less narrative or decorative than it is textural. Some object acquires a presence that is not correlated to their narrative justification and thus contributes more to the atmosphere than the plot.

How it is that the radiator of Eraserhead came to be of such importance is recounted by Lynch in Lynch on Lynch.^243(*). The radiator is more akin to an animal with its litter of straw, its leaking oil and gurgling sounds than a household implement. As a piece of machinery, it is the incarnation of the sound and smoke of the industrial production. As Lynch corroborates the machinery theme in his earlier films:

Machinery is predominant in all of them. I like factory people, steel, rivets, bolts, wrenches, oil and smoke. Industrialization is never a central theme, but it always lurks in the background.^244(*)

Eventually the radiator will become a narrative element as the portal to the dream stage of Henry. Another object that has become a recurring motif in Lynch's films is the telephone. Telephones are used as telephones, but they are also a sign of ubiquity; they offer the possibility to be present in two places at the same time.

The first appearance of this theme may be in Blue Velvet, but with a walkie-talkie. At the end of the film, Jeffrey is in Dorothy's apartment with the two corpses and uses the walkie-talkie of the corrupt cop to call detective Williams, when he realises that Franck can intercept the call and that he is now coming for him. Jeffrey then tells detective Williams that he is hiding in the bedroom, while in fact he goes back to wait to in his first hiding place, the closet in the living room, with the cop's gun. Through the walkie-talkie he lures Franck to believe him to be where he is not.

In the pilot episode of Twin Peaks, it is an abandoned telephone that, in place of Laura's mother, cries on the floor upon realising than Laura is dead. In Lost Highway, the ubiquitous powers of telephones became more pronounced. When Fred calls home to check on his wife, the ringing telephones become Fred's imaginary way of projecting himself to where his wife is, anxiously searching through the house (see Fig. 9). The ubiquitous possibilities of the telephone is made manifest in the scene between Fred and the Mystery Man at Andy's party. Handing over to Fred his mobile phone, the Mystery Man asks him to ring home, to prove that he is there. When Fred eventually complies, he is indeed answered by the Mystery Man talking through the phone from his house as well as standing in front of him.

In The Straight Story, telephones are used in a less supernatural manner, however they are surrounded with a consideration and fear that almost gives them the status of a cultic object. At the beginning of the film Dorothy, the neighbour, and Bud, a friend have discovered Alvin on the floor, having had a stroke but perfectly lucid. A moment of confusion ensues, during which Dorothy cannot bring herself to call for help. It is as if she was not certain whether the situation is important enough to justify the use of the telephone. In a later scene, Alvin and Rose are watching a storm together through the window, when the phone rings. For a while neither moves and the ringing takes on momentum. When Rose eventually answers it is to learn that Alvin's brother has had, likewise, a stroke.

During his journey to see his brother, Alvin will phone his daughter only once, when in absolute need, weeks after his departure. The whole scene revolves around the telephone. Alvin needs to contact Rose to ask her to send him his check to fix the lawn-mower. He goes to his host to ask if he can use their phone, and upon finding out that it is a cordless phone, he insists on staying outside. He then calls Rose who is delighted to hear from him, as she was worried. When looking for a pen to write Alvin's address down, she does not let go of the handset, stretching the cord to its utmost in her search. It is like if she was afraid of losing her father if she was to let go of the phone. His call completed, Alvin deposits the cordless phone on the doorstep with a couple of dollars bills slipped underneath: as a little offering to the gods of communication.

Mulholland Drive could be seen as a pantheon to the glory of the pre-mobile telephone. They are all there, the public phone, the yellow utility one, the standard black phone, the domestic cordless, all the different type of telephones except the mobile. But they are also the sign of an underground web of communications of which the spectator will apprehend the effects on the life of the characters but not the nature. This telephonic presence is epitomised in the last exchange between Joe and Ed:

Joe: So that's it, that's Ed's famous black book.

Ed: The history of the world in phone numbers.

Upon which Joe shoots Ed in the head and takes the book. The spectator will never hear about it again. The whole scene does not seem to fulfil any other function than reinforce the sense of hidden powers and the absurd way they destroy life. Joe will subsequently kill a woman working in the next office, the cleaning-man and his vacuum cleaner, as pointed out by Michel Chion, because they are where they should not have been.^245(*)

Thus characters, like objects, visuals and sounds, may functions as textural elements. Martha Nochimson commented on Wild at Heart:

The images that rivet our imagination tend to complicate rather than further the plot: immensely magnified, close-up images of cigarette ash, shoes, light bulbs, and the visceral tones of Marietta's body smeared with lipstick and gleaming red. Even the villains exist in the plot as distracting, physiological presences.^246(*)

Like a close up on a particular texture, some characters are magnified beyond all purpose. Ben, in Blue Velvet, for all his extravagant presence, is only keeping Dorothy's child. Mr Reindeer's role in Wild at Heart is basically to give away the two dollar coins to the appointed killers. The scene in which these characters appear, detached of narrative function, are transformed into an opulent fabric, enriching the atmosphere of the film.

However extravagant these scenes appear in the construction of a film, they add complexity to a representation of the world in the layering of perceptions. Thierry Jousse warn against the temptation to just luxuriate in the sensual aspect of Mulholland Drive:

In Mulholland Drive, there is an ambiance-film side, in the sense that the creation of incredibly sophisticated atmospheres and the permanent fluidity of their sequence are primarily driving the perception of the spectator. Which often leads to believe that everything is mystery, nothing rational, explicable and that one just as to let oneself be carried away, like in an environment, an installation or a musical piece, by pure sensuality. But in truth, however essential this sensory dimension may be, it shouldn't make one forget that the film is also a text to read and interpret. It is in that interstice, this breach made by the disjunction or the ambivalence between these two poles apparently contradictory, that precisely the film engulfs itself or slide in, object at once rational and intangible.^247(*)

5

In the Baroque the soul entertains a complex relation with the body. Forever indissociable from the body, it discovers a vertiginous animality that gets it tangled in the pleats of matter, but also an organic or cerebral humanity (the degree of development) that allows it to rise up, and that will make it ascend over all other folds.^248(*)

Gilles Deleuze, the Fold, Leibniz and the Baroque.

`A word is also a texture', said Lynch talking about his use of letters in his paintings.^249(*) Language in Lynch's films is treated as yet another thread in the weaving of the film's fabric. He uses words, rhythms in sentences and actors' voices as so many textural elements, as Chris Rodley commented in Lynch on Lynch:

He [Lynch] has frequently referred with great enthusiasm to the qualities of a particular actor's voice. His ear for the rhythms of speech, as with all sounds, is highly tuned: The Grandmother, his second short, reduced (or elevated) all dialogue to the status of pure sound effect. When one considers what Isabella Rosselini has called his «hatred» of words - on the basis that they are so «imprecise» - it's clear that Lynch's relationship to language is not only complex, but unique in contemporary cinema. `He's found a way to make words work for him' concludes Reavey. `He uses them non-verbally. He paints with them. They are textural, and have a sensory presence. He's very poetic.'^250(*)

Lynch further talks about the importance of a particular pronunciation in discussing Eraserhead with Chris Rodley:

Chris Rodley: How much did you work on the way characters spoke in the film? The sparse dialogue seems to be delivered in a very particular way.

David Lynch: Well, it had to be a certain way. And it came out of rehearsals. There are many ways they could speak that would be completely wrong. And so you keep working for the way that is right for the character, right for the mood. You get into phrasing, loud and soft, and this and that. You could see dialogue as kind of a sound effect. And yet it has all this stuff to do with character.^251(*)

The notion of the right tone, therefore, does not come from within the psychological depth of the character trying to express his emotions, but from without: from the overall feel of the atmosphere. The implication is that if it sounds right, it will also be right for the character.

The speech rhythm is particularly striking in the first part of Lost Highway; the constrained way every word is uttered greatly participates to the suffocating atmosphere of the house. The slowness of the speech integrates the silence between words as so many suspended sentences. It feels like the very air of the house is being suspended.

A completely different use of dialogue is made in the disco scene in Fire Walk With Me. Because the music is so loud, the actors have to yell at each other, and since they are barely intelligible, the scene has been subtitled. Lynch explained his choices to Chris Rodley:

There were certain things that needed to be heard and understood. At the same time, I can't stand to pot out the music so you can hear the dialogue. In a club you can't hear anything, but you can hear something if the person's yelling, and that was the idea. So music was cranked to the max and people were really talking loud enough to be heard, so it worked. So the music is at ten and the dialogue is at two, but you don't worry about it, because you can use subtitles.^252(*)

An interesting precedent in the use of language that is not necessarily understood can be found in the soundtrack experiments made by Max Ophuls for Lola Montes in 1955. The curator Stefan Drössler, who is working on the restoration of the film, explains how the soundtrack had been dubbed to «correct» some of Ophuls choices:

With subtitles used sparingly, large parts of the dialogue were indecipherable for those unfamiliar with the foreign language. This is what Ophuls wanted: to let the spectator understand only what is important. Language was for him an acoustic element of the soundscape, conveying atmosphere rather than content. He wrote: `The height of acting is achieved when the word itself has lost its importance...the inner feelings words convey, may sometimes be stronger, sometimes weaker than the words. Sometimes they're in contradiction to them, the dialogue may drag along after the feeling...the experience begins a long time before the word and ends a long time after it'. Thus there are in the German premiere version a number of barely intelligible sequences in which characters mumble and mutter or noise masks the dialogue in a similar way to the foreground objects that at times obscure the actors.^253(*)

For Ophuls, as for Lynch, words are not reduced to dialogues whose function is to communicate information; they are also sounds which participate to the perceptual aspect of the film.

Interestingly, linguistically Lynch also uses words as pure signifier. As children learn, the word is linked to the image of what is signified. In Blue Velvet, there is this surprising cut operated over the word scissor: the coroner is explaining to Jeffrey that the ear has probably been cut with scissors. As he pronounces the word «scissors» there is a cut to the next shot which is a close-up of a pair of scissors, but it is only cutting the «no trespassing» banner used to enclose the field where the ear has been found. The effect is at turns violent and comical: violent by its immediate association with the gruesome image of the amputation of the ear, and comical as the scissors are revealed to be more innocent. Or are they?

According to Michel Chion, Lynch had tried this superposition between words and images without quite making the connection in Dune:

In fact, Lynch runs up against the limits of cinema. In Dune, the words never quite manage to find an adequate incarnation because they are too laden with symbolism from the outset. For example, the word «spice» never quite attains and joins with the concrete, recurring image of the black liquid which is its visual equivalent, maliciously compared by some to a coffee advertisement. Lynch took an enormous but admirable risk when he banked on the encounter between words and image-symbols.^254(*)

The signifying presence of names is also at the heart of the Dune project, as film and novel. Michel Chion analysed the verb as a creative element in the film:

The verb in Dune is omnipresent, signifying, ritualistic, serious. If there is humour (and there is) it comes from this seriousness. We know that in Franck Herbert's novel, the onomastic is very important; for instance the fact that the planet Dune is called most of the time Arrakis. Franck Herbert knows that the space between the two names of the same planet, or the same person, is for the imagination a greater expanse than the millions of light-years between the galaxies. Becoming film, with the David Lynch adaptation, the Verb will remain generator, representing places and spaces. Planets are first names, space is interior (sublime sequence of the travel to Arrakis, without moving). The word remains apart from what we see, and the film lives, vibrates, from this interval.^255(*)

A place or a character changes according to the name it is given. The name is the identity. The name is creator of the identity. The character played by Kyle Mac Lachlan, Paul Atreides, is not the same when he is Muad'Dib, and yet he is not different.

This tension between names and identities is also present in Mulholland Drive. Betty and Diane are one and the same person and yet, they are not. What was in Betty is no longer in Diane. The interplay of names and identity takes on a vertiginous twist with the character of Rita/Camilla. Amnesic, when Betty asks for her name she borrows the name of «Rita» from a poster she sees of the film Gilda. The character of Gilda, played by Rita Hayworth in the film, is provocative and teasing, so Rita has little in common with her namesake's part in that film. But when she returns, in control, as Camilla Rhodes, she has become Gilda-like, provocative and deliberately arousing Diane's jealousy.

Words and names become forces shaping the world around them. The name shapes the personality, somehow echoing the idea that it is the manner a material is folded, that is the way forces have acted upon it, that constitutes its texture.

Thus the elements composing a Lynch's film - visual, aural, narrative or linguistic - come together to form the overall texture of the film. They interplay with each other at different levels and cannot be clearly differentiated from each other. It is the manner of their interaction that will form the specific feel - or mood - of the film, not each element taken separately.

* ²⁴³ `And then I saw the radiator in my head. And it was an instrument for producing warmth in a room; it made me sort of happy - like me as Henry, say. I saw this opening to another place. So I ran into the set and looked at the radiator more closely. You know, there are many different types of radiators, but I'd never seen another radiator like this. It had a little kind of chamber, like a stage in it. I'm not kidding you. It was right there, and it just changed everything.' Lynch on Lynch, p. 64-65.

* ²⁴⁴ Lynch on Lynch, p. 114.

* ²⁴⁵ Michel Chion, David Lynch, Editions Cahiers du Cinéma, 2001, p. 260. `Il faut donc accepter la règle du jeu de ce film, qui est que certaines intrigues secondaires (notamment tout ce qui concerne le tueur à gage qu'on voit, au début, assassiner trois personnes plus un aspirateur) disparaissent sans laisser presque aucune trace.'

* ²⁴⁶ Martha Nochimson, The Passion, p. 51.

* ²⁴⁷ Thierry Jousse, `Mulholland Drive: l'amour à mort', http://www.ifrance.com/davidlynch/cdc, my translation: `Il y a dans Mulholland Drive un coté film ambiant au sens où la création d'ambiances incroyablement sophistiquées et la permanente fluidité de leurs enchaînements conduisent en priorité la perception du spectateur. Ce qui revient souvent à croire que tout est mystère, rien n'est rationnel explicable et qu'il s'agit seulement de se laisser porter, comme dans un environnement, une installation ou une pièce musicale, par la pure sensualité. Mais en réalité, cette dimension sensorielle pour fondamentale qu'elle soit, ne doit jamais faire oublier que le film est aussi un texte qu'il faut lire et interpréter. C'est dans l'interstice, la faille créée par la disjonction ou l'ambivalence entre ces deux pôles apparemment contradictoires que s'engouffre ou se glisse précisément le film, objet tout à la fois rationnel et insaisissable.'

* ²⁴⁸ Deleuze, The Fold, p. 11. `L'âme dans le Baroque a avec le corps un rapport complexe: toujours inséparable du corps, elle trouve en celui-ci une animalité qui l'étourdit, qui l'empêtre dans les replis de la matière, mais aussi avec une humanité organique et cérébrale (le degré de développement) qui lui permet de s'élever, et la fera monter sur de tout autres plis.' Le Pli, p. 17.

* ²⁴⁹ Lynch on Lynch, p. 22.

* ²⁵⁰ Chris Rodley, Lynch on Lynch, p. 32.

* ²⁵¹ Ibid., p.72.

* ²⁵² Rodley, Lynch on Lynch, p. 188-189.

* ²⁵³ Stefan Drössler, `Lola Montes: The Restoration', Sight & Sound, Vol. 12, No. 6, June 2002, p. 28.

* ²⁵⁴ Michel Chion, David Lynch, BFI, p. 68-69. `C'est d'ailleurs à un point-limite du cinéma que Lynch s'affronte: dans Dune, les mots n'arrivent pas à s'incarner totalement, parce que dès le début ils sont trop porteurs de symbolique. Le mot spice par exemple, ne parvient pas à rejoindre et à fusionner avec l'image concrète et récurrente d'une goutte de liquide noir qui lui correspond visuellement, et qu'on a méchamment comparée à une publicité pour café. Lynch a pris là un risque énorme - mais un beau risque - en comptant sur la rencontre des mots et des images-symboles.' Editions Cahiers du Cinéma, p. 84.

* ²⁵⁵ Michel Chion, `Dune, les visages et les noms' http://www.ifrance.com/davidlynch/cdc, my translation: `Le verbe dans Dune est omniprésent, signifiant, rituel, sérieux. Si il y a de l'humour (et il y en a) il est à partir de ce sérieux. On sait que dans le roman de Franck Herbert, l'onomastique est très importante: le fait par exemple, que la planète Dune soit appelée le plus souvent Arrakis. Franck Herbert n'ignore pas que l'espace entre les deux noms d'une même planète ou d'une même personne, est pour la rêverie humaine un champs plus grand que les millions d'années lumières entre les galaxies. Se faisant film, dans l'adaptation de David Lynch, le Verbe continue d'être fondateur, de représenter le lieu, l'espace. Les planètes sont d'abord des noms, l'espace est intérieur (sublime séquence du voyage vers Arrakis, en sur-place). Le mot reste en écart avec ce que l'on voit, et le film vit, vibre, à partir de cet écart.'