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

CHAPTER V:

THE DARK DEPTHS

1

Classic clearness means representation in ultimate, enduring forms; baroque unclearness means making the forms look like something changing, becoming. The whole transformation of classic form by the multiplication of the members, the whole deformation of the old forms by apparently senseless combinations, can be put under one heading. In absolute clearness there lies a motive of that fixation of the figure which the baroque eschewed on principle as something unnatural.^256(*)

Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History.

The first lighting used by films was daylight. Louis Lumière captured little portions of the sunlit world, and later, in the United States, most sets were outdoors with the Californian sun providing the lighting. For indoors scenes, lighting's only concern was to provide sufficient light for the exposure of the film in the camera, and it generally consisted in a diffuse overall illumination.

During the 1910s, technical improvements, such as the adoption for lighting of arc equipment, allowed for lighting effects in the studios. They permitted the use of directional light which could provide realistically motivated sources of light and thus integrating the lighting within the narrative, as the authors of Classical Hollywood explains:

With the classical drive to subsume every technique within the overall motivation of the narrative, there came an interest in varying lighting to suit the situation - to have the lighting issuing realistically from narrative space and varying with circumstances.^257(*)

Some experiments were made pushing the contrasts of light and dark to its utmost, such as having a single source of light, for a candle light scene, plunging the surrounding space in darkness. If such technical prowess was praised, the use of extreme contrasts, obscuring the actors and their actions and thus impeding the progression of the narrative, was generally avoided in Hollywood. The general practice settled on a less obtrusive mode of lightning balanced between realism and narrative requirements:

Selective lighting adds a pleasing aesthetic quality to the image, but can be justified as having a source within the scenic space. Hence it enhances the narrative effect while providing a modicum of spectacle in its own right.^258(*)

A more dramatic use of light was made by the German cinema of the 1920s. Influenced by the romanticism, German expressionist films are not so much concerned about realistically motivated source of light, than they are about revealing the shadows in human nature through the use of light. In the German expressionism films, light and shadows are a projection of good and evil forces and therefore reveal moral and psychological depth and turmoil. Emmanuel Plasseraud speaks of `expressionist and fantastic shadows, which are an expression of the dark depth of mankind.'^259(*) Gilles Deleuze in Cinema 1 considers Expressionism:

(Expressionism) invokes [...] a dark, swampy life into which everything plunges, whether chopped up by shadows or plunged into mists. The non-organic life of things, a frightful life, which is oblivious to the wisdom and limits of the organism, is the first principle of Expressionism, valid for the whole of nature, that is, for the unconscious spirit, lost in darkness, light which has become opaque, lumen opacatum.^260(*)

Examples of an antagonistic relationship between light and darkness can be found in the cinema of Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau (1888-1931). In Nosferatu (1924), Dracula is the shadow moving on the world, which only the light of love (and dawn) can defeat. In Faust (1926), the fight is concentrated within one man for whom soul the devil and the Archangel St Michael are fighting. Light and shadow move over the face of Faust as so many conflicts. In the films of Fritz Lang, such as Metropolis (1928), the projected shadows of the characters seem to take the shape of their fears or desires. This expressionist use of light is to be found in the «American Gothic» horror film of the 1930s, in the films of James Whale, such as Frankenstein (1932) and The Bride of Frankenstein (1935).

In his essay on baroque cinema, Vestiges du baroque: l'origine fantasmée (2000), Emmanuel Plasseraud differentiates the expressionist shadow to a baroque one, of which he gives a definition:

The baroque apprehends the shadow for its implicit instability, inconsistency and immateriality. It offers the shadow an autonomous life, which is not threatening, but rather disturbing.^261(*)

The shadows which often mask the faces of the characters in Orson Welles' films are not the mark of evil at work, but the disturbing undecidability of their identity. The only thing anyone can be sure of, about Charles Foster Kane in Citizen Kane is what he has accomplished or built. His motivations remain in the shadows. The character of Hank Quinlan in Touch of Evil is even more ambiguous since the viewer cannot even ascertain his achievements as a detective.

2

The seventeenth century found a beauty in the darkness which swallows up the form. The style of movement, impressionism, of its very nature tends to a certain unclearness. It is adopted, not as the product of a naturalistic conception - the visible world simply not yielding fully clear picture - but because there is a taste for indeterminate clarity. Only in this way did impressionism become possible. Its conditions lie in the field of decoration, not only of imitation.^262(*)

Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History.

Lynch's films generally begin in darkness. From the darkness, faces or stars appear. The darkness is cosmic. It is the floating planet-like-face of Henri in Eraserhead, the luminous face of John Merrick's mother in The Elephant Man or Princess Irulan's face hovering over the darkness of the known universe in Dune. It is an undulating piece of blue velvet which opens Blue Velvet but it becomes the darkness of outer space before the camera slowly moves down to the sunny world of Lumberton. The darkness is engulfed in fire for Wild at Heart, and covered in snow for Fire Walk With Me, but it surrounds the racing portion of lighted road for Lost Highway. The camera moves slowly amongst the stars for The Straight Story, and pans over the bejewelled darkness of night time Los Angeles in Mulholland Drive.

Like the baroque painters, Lynch prefers to prime his screen with darkness from which the light will draw the shapes out. Deleuze described this process:

This is a baroque contribution: in place of the white chalk or plaster that primes the canvas, Tintoretto and Caravaggio use a dark, red-brown background on which they place the thickest shadows, and paint directly by shading toward the shadows. The painting is transformed. Things jump out of the background, colors spring from the common base that attests to their obscure nature, figures are defined by their covering more than their contour.^263(*)

Pauline Kael remarked about Blue Velvet, that Lynch's creative powers seem to be more particularly engaged when dealings with the shadows than by the sunlight:

Lynch's imagistic talent, which is for the dark and unaccountable, flattens out in the sunlight scenes [...] His work goes back to the avant-garde filmmakers of the twenties and thirties, who were often painters - and he himself trained to be one. He takes off from the experimental traditions that Hollywood has usually ignored.^264(*)

Thus she compares him to, either the German expressionist style, or the influence it had on American cinema. A cinema where the shadows, which are relegated to a shading function in the classical Hollywood film, have their place on the screen.

However, there are important differences between the expressionist approach to darkness and Lynch's. Firstly, he is very attentive about providing a realistically motivated source of light, to the cost of some readability as Ron Garcia, the cinematographer of Fire Walk With Me recounts from the making of a scene in the forest with Laura and Bobby:

`David doesn't like night-time exteriors to look like they're lit', Garcia recounts with a sigh. `He said, «Where does the light come from?» and I replied, «It comes from the same place as the music, David». Well, he didn't go for that; he wanted the whole scene to be lit just by flashlights, which we'd done on the pilot.'^265(*)

And Lynch does not use fantastic shadows either, such as can be seen in Nosferatu, where Dracula is preceded by his fantastically drawn out shadow. In Lost Highway for instance, after Fred has gone down the corridor and Renee calls him, two shadows are seen to be making their way back to the bedroom. These are the ordinary fuzzy shadows a dim light would provide, just indicating the movement of two bodies not their exact anatomy. Which somehow makes them more frightening.

The other difference from the expressionist style is the meaning of darkness. Lynch's darkness is not evil; at least not necessarily so. Pauline Kael remarked that the darkness of Blue Velvet was not alienating, but rather homely:

It's the fantasy (rather than the plot) that's organic, and there's no sticky-sweet lost innocence, because the darkness was always there, inside. The film's kinkiness isn't alienating-its naïveté keeps it from that. And its vision isn't alienating: this is American darkness-darkness in colour, darkness with a happy ending. Lynch might turn out to be the first populist surrealist.^266(*)

The theme of the coupling of light/dark with good/evil as been developed at length by Martha Nochimson in her study of David Lynch, The Passion of David Lynch. She compares David Lynch's use of these oppositions to those of Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock. She supports an argument that the three directors have dissociated the usual evil/dark and good/light association. She gives as examples the occurrences of evil in open sunlit spaces such as many scenes from The Birds or the crop duster attack in North By Northwest, and from Lynch's films:

They most obviously resemble each other in the unusual intensity of audience response to their alteration of bad/good-dark/light narrative polarities. Lynch's filming of many of his most threatening scenes in full light intensifies the shock to the audience's nervous system, as in Blue Velvet where, although Lynch uses virtual three-point lighting, violence lurks just beneath the surface of every word and gesture at Ben's place. Bob materializes in the sun-drenched living room of the Hayward home in Twin Peaks, and when he appears in darkness he is suffused with a light within which there are no shadows.^267(*)

She concludes that in their work `morality is irrelevant to the experience of dark and light'.^268(*) Ron Garcia gives a more pragmatic point of view over the circumstances leading to some aesthetic decisions for Fire Walk with Me to Stephen Pizzello:

`We went up to Seattle with the assumption that the shoot would be just like the pilot, when the sun never shone. It was overcast all the time, so we pumped in all this color and gave it this unique look. This time, we went up there and found all of this sunshine! We decided to exploit the contrast: here was this incredible scenery, with these golds and greens and blue skies, against which these horrible things were happening to Laura Palmer. It wasn't designed that way, it just happened that way.'^269(*)

Thus the circumstances and the mood of a scene, rather than a moralistic approach, will decide its lighting, and Fire Walk With Me turned out to be, arguably, the most morally disturbing of Lynch's film while being one of his sunniest.

Thus if the films of David Lynch come out of the darkness, this darkness is neither evil nor fantastic. In her review of Mulholland Drive, Martha Nochimson proposes a possible reading:

Lynch does not see darkness as a morally negative place, but as a space of the unknown of the subconscious, from which anything; both the marvelous and the terrible can emerge.^270(*)

3

Leibniz is haunted by depth of the soul, the dark depth, the «fuscum subnigrum». Substances or souls `draw everything from their own depths'. That is the second aspect of mannerism, without which the first would remain empty. The first is the spontaneity of manners that is opposed to the essentiality of the attribute. The second is the omnipresence of the dark depths which is opposed to the clarity of form, and without which manners would have no place to surge forth from. The entire formula of the mannerism of substances is: `All is born to them out of their own depths, through a perfect spontaneity.'^271(*)

Gilles Deleuze, The Fold, Leibniz and the Baroque

In the pilot episode of Twin Peaks, at the end of his first meeting with the town people, special agent Dale Cooper warns them against the night: `I will remind you that these crimes occurred at night'. It is an oddly paradoxical statement coming from someone who does not hesitate to trust his dreams to solve a criminal case. And in Lynch's films if the night is full of crimes, it is also full of stars and dreams. Starry skies open two of his films: Dune and The Straight Story, and if, for Mulholland Drive, it is the lights of Los Angeles over which the opening credits roll, they shine as so many stars in the night. In his entry on `Night' in the Lynch's kit, Michel Chion comments on its meaning:

Why should night acquire such meanings? Perhaps because its mantle of darkness erases the distinct contours of objects and reconstitutes a lost whole. Darkness unifies and fuses what light separates. Night rejoins what day disjoins.^272(*)

And this separation can be painful for those that are not ready. In the opening shot of Lost Highway, Fred Madison is sitting in darkness in his home. He is drawn out of the dark by a pull on his cigarette which lights part of his face. As the window blind opens and lets the morning light in, he winces with pain (see Fig. 10). It looks as if this process of coming to the light is full of discomfort and sufferings for Fred. His whole presence feels uncertain. His discomfort becomes aggressiveness toward everything that surrounds him.

His identity, as much as his body seems to be made of an unstable matter, not quite finding the space to exist in the daylight; he will walk back into the darkness, down the corridor, but he will not re-emerge alone. The terrible is accompanying him (see Fig. 11).

This difficulty to be in the light, to become oneself, was already at the heart of the Laura Palmer's character in Fire Walk with Me. As Laura says to Donna: `Night-time is my time', it is the time where she can try to become herself.

From the darkness also emerges the marvellous. In Eraserhead, it is the «beautiful girl across the hall» who materialises out of the darkness beyond Henri's door. After he heard a knock on his door he opens it on complete darkness. As he is intensely scrutinizing it, his beautiful neighbour slowly emerges and asks to come in. In Blue Velvet, there is a similar scene for the first encounter of Jeffrey and Sandy. As Jeffrey comes out of the William's house he turns around as he hears a voice asking: `are you the one who found the ear?' As he looks, the screen is filled with darkness and it takes a few seconds for Sandy to emerge from it and to appear to Jeffrey (see Fig. 12).

Commenting on the Blue Box in Mulholland Drive, Martha Nochimson further elaborates on the power of darkness:

Given Lynch's faith in darkness as the loam of both creativity and destruction, these aspects of the unseen that emerge from the box, are most fruitfully read as contingent on the integrity of the sensibility that enters the darkness.^273(*)

The darkness in Lynch's film is not a void or a black hole; it is a loam from which the better and the worst can emerge. Characters come out and return to the primordial matter: the darkness.

Given the importance of its generative powers, it is little wonder that Lynch is so specific about what the darkness should look like. Fred Elmes, the cinematographer of Blue Velvet speaks to Ron Magid about the technical difficulties involved to get it right:

For Fred Elmes (cinematographer), the greatest challenge on Blue Velvet was to insure that the liquid blacks that Lynch demanded were preserved in the release prints of the film. `That was one of the things I was most concerned about' Elmes concurs. `It's a dark story-and we knew that there were a lot of night exteriors and there were a lot of times in Dorothy's apartment where there wasn't much light because the mood required it to be dim. We needed to maintain a quality in the negative that in the final release print would give us a rich black that duplicated what we saw when we photographed the scene'.^274(*)

This is echoed by Peter Deming, the cinematographer of Lost Highway, as reported by Stephen Pizzello:

Deming says that his biggest challenge on the show was trying to accommodate Lynch's love of dark, inky visuals. `It was a struggle' he concedes. `I know what David likes; if he had his way, everything would be a little underexposed and murky, which is a murder to me'.^275(*)

Peter Deming recounts, with some detail, the difficulty encountered by the whole crew to obtain the effects Lynch wanted for the scene where Fred vanishes down the corridor:

For certain key scenes, super-minimal lighting schemes were employed to great effect. A particularly impressive example of this strategy is the filmmakers' sepulchral rendering of the Madison's main hallway, which has a foreboding quality reminiscent of the work of one of Lynch's favourite painters, Francis Bacon. Achieving this look required some deft interplay between the various crewmembers. `Fortunately, the hallway was a setting we could control, even though we were shooting at a real house', says Deming. `Patty Norris and her crew physically altered the structure, making the hallway as long as possible. She also helped me by putting Bill Pullman in dark clothes, and by painting the walls a color that wouldn't reflect too much light. To cap things off, we hung a black curtain over the windows at the end of the hall.' [...] `The 98 (film stock) can really pick up details in the dark, so I knew that we were in trouble if the end of the hallway didn't disappear to the naked eye,' says Deming. ^276(*)

Deming concludes on Lynch's choice of darkness:

`David feels that a murky black darkness is scarier than a completely black darkness; he wanted this particular hallway to be a slightly brownish black that would swallow characters up.'^277(*)

From these dark depths, how can the characters surging from it take their place in the light? The only time that Fred Madison seems to exist, to occupy his space, is at the Luna Lounge, performing on stage as a saxophone player. His activity as a musician may have been his way out. The only time he tries to engage in communication with someone is after one of the detective, who came to check the Madison's house, asks him a question about his musical activity:

Detective 1: You're a musician?

Fred: Yeah.

Detective 2: What's your act?

Fred: Tenor, tenor sax. (Tentatively) Do you?

Detective 2 (laughing): No, tone deaf.

Fred's tentative effort to engage is abruptly ended; what can a musician have to share with a tone deaf person? The rest of the dialogue is indeed a «dialogue de sourds»: a succession of misunderstandings and non sequiturs.

4

This notion of metamorphosis is governed by a baroque axiom, borrowed from the Venetian opera: one must produce effects to engender affects, and these affects create beings. I thus retain these three terms, effects, affects and beings, and these three terms constitute the triumph of the baroque, for these effects establish manners as infinite operations and operations of the infinite.^278(*)

Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Orlan, Triomphe du Baroque

Lynch's films are full of places where characters perform on stage or are affected by the performance on stage. These places are generally clubs or theatres. The performances are often musical and generally consist of a singing act (except Fred Madison, who plays the sax). The emotional investment in the words of the song from either the performer or the listener seems to unlock an aspect of their persona. As if the words were containing some key to their ill-being.

In Fire Walk With Me, one of the only moments of retrieval for Laura Palmer is when she goes into the Roadhouse and she listens, crying, to the singing of Julee Cruise. The music with its slow and melancholic melodies is strangely at odds with the place, a biker's bar more easily associated with Rock music for instance. The song strongly affects Laura and for a moment there is a glimpse of a possible alteration of her downward trajectory; it offers the possibility that the song will have effects on her capacity to react, in spite of the fact that the spectator of Twin Peaks already knows this is not going to happen. Eventually, Laura brushes away her emotions and goes on with her original intentions, plunging further.

The power of songs also affect Frank Booth, in Blue Velvet; at the Slow Club as he sits crying while listening to Dorothy singing Blue Velvet, and at Ben's place, where he is strangely moved again while Ben lip synchs In Dreams over Roy Orbison's voice. These are the only moments where some tenderness pierces through the bullish persona of Frank. The song seems to touch in him feelings that he is unable to translate in his behaviour and switch them off as he ragingly turns off the tape recorder. The possibility of another Frank Booth is quickly perceived and gone. When in the next scene Frank mouths the words of In Dreams to Jeffrey they have become venomous and threatening. The promise the song seemed to contain has become a curse.

The promised possibilities of songs was already present in Eraserhead when the «lady from the radiator» was singing to Henry:

In heaven everything is fine

You've got your good things

And I got mine

However, the power of song is ambiguous; it can be misleading as well as redemptory. In The Elephant Man, it is partly the magical power of the musical which John Merrick has seen in the theatre that enhances his desire for normality and leads him to suicide, as Martha Nochimson argued in The Passion of David Lynch:

Through its sweet poison, the pantomime eclipses, as no Bytes or night porter ever could, the life-giving tension that Merrick represents, that which has made him so precious to Mrs. Kendal and to Ann and Frederick Treves.^279(*)

In Mulholland Drive, the power of performance will take particular pre-eminence. The idea of lip synch already presents in Blue Velvet with Ben's performance will be taken further. First there is the series of auditions for the film Adam is making, The Sylvia North Story, where the actresses perform recorded songs. This set up reinforces the artificiality of the selection process - which the spectator knows to be biased and just wait for the `This is the girl' order to go through.

This scene is also the counterpart to the precedent where Betty was performing another kind of lip synch for her audition. She had been rehearsing the scene earlier with Rita, over-acting her melodramatic part. Michel Chion remarked:

What is frightening in her is the impossibility to know whether she acts or whether she believes in it, as if she could not stop herself, and was risking the whole of her identity in the least of her acts.^280(*)

For the audition, even though the text is absolutely identical, Betty transforms it in a strongly erotic scene, as Martha Nochimson comments:

Her reading portrays the magic and wonder of artistic creativity when she creates something - a dangerously erotic mood - out of absolutely nothing.^281(*)

Betty's act shows a depth of emotions which did not seem to be in her as the naïve blonde, however this capacity for desire and hatred introduces the Diane she is to become - the final: `I'll kill you, I'll kill us both' of the scene becomes strangely prophetic. Thus the enacting and re-enacting of words takes on strange resonance.

Thierry Jousse commented on the film:

To live to speak to sing in lip synch (play back), that is to repeat words already written in giving them a different interpretation, in changing their direction, such is the story of the characters and the cinema of today.^282(*)

The most dramatic scene however, is when Rita takes Betty to Club Silencio in the middle of the night. The Club Silencio looks like a traditional theatre with its stalls and balcony - and a stage with heavy red curtains. A performer announces what seems to be the principle of the show: `No hay banda, there is no band'. He specifies that everything is recorded and he demonstrates a few tricks of recording which for all their naïve magic have a chilling effect; a stick lands soundlessly and a trumpeter is shown to be silent. This demonstration sends Betty in an uncontrollable shake, and both, her and Rita looks scared. The next act is the singer Rebekah Del Rio; Annette Davison describes the performance in her essay on David Lynch:

The integrity of live performance is subsequently re-affirmed by the following act, singer Rebekah Del Rio; the performer audibly knocks the microphone as she takes up her position on stage. During her impassioned performance of Roy Orbison's `Crying' (sung in Spanish), we see close-up shots of Ms Del Rio's face which function to persuade us that the performance we are seeing is real - that is, live - rather than recorded. In the middle of the song Ms Del Rio suddenly falls on the ground unconscious, though her vocal performance continues on the soundtrack. The impact of this moment is startling: in retrospect, the magician's control and manipulation of the soundtrack is foregrounded.^283(*)

The singing a-cappella of Rebekah Del Rio, with a rich and resounding voice seemingly blows away the precedent unease by its emotional integrity. The performance affects Betty and Rita so deeply; they break down in tears. When Rebekah Del Rio collapses as an empty shell on the stage while her voice keeps vibrating in the air - as announced: everything is recorded - the effect is devastating. The dissociation of this full body voice from the sensual presence of the performer leaves Betty and Rita stunned. The performance, which had seemed to carry some answers, is revealed as fake, just as Ben singing In Dreams in Blue Velvet. But whereas Frank became enraged, Betty falls apart and vanishes soon after.

The performance of words and songs in Lynch's films has a strange formative power through the affect of the characters. To take place in the light, Lynch's character need to perform or to project themselves in words.

The cinematic world of David Lynch begins before the coming of light, in the full and morally unmarked darkness. These unbounded dark depths may be what he will come to call the Unified Field.^284(*) When the light comes to draw the characters out of the dark it is often a difficult moment for them. To become - conscious? - they need to act out a part, but they are always at risk of choosing the «wrong» role which instead of bringing out their potential, annihilates them. Fred Madison could have focussed his being around music instead of the supposed infidelity of his wife. Betty could have stayed with Adam after their intense exchange of looks and maybe altered both their fate instead of rushing off to act her «saviour» role with Rita.

In The Straight Story as Alvin Straight journeys toward the past, he recounts parts of his life, from which his alienation appears gradually more evident. He teaches lessons in life to his companions but, as Martha Nochimson remarked in her review of the film, he did not apply them himself:

Alvin is a disquieting portrait of American frontier machismo, warts and all. Now near the end of his life, Alvin dispenses wisdom about maintaining strong familial and communal ties, but it is hard won and contrasts with his own relational failures.^285(*)

The journey to reconcile himself with his brother thus seems like his last attempt to act his life on his own terms, forgoing his pride, the ridiculousness of his equipment and other material problems. The decision to go is taken during a stormy night as if the darkness and the violence of the elements outside - and the fear of death brought about by the strokes that hit both brothers - had allowed for a complete change of attitude. The film ends, as it started, with the expanding darkness of the universe, as Lyle and Alvin look at it together as when they were kids.

* ²⁵⁶ Wölfflin, Principles, p. 222.

* ²⁵⁷ Bordwell, Thomson and Staiger, Classical Hollywood, p. 223.

* ²⁵⁸ Ibid., p. 225.

* ²⁵⁹ Emmanuel Plasseraud, `Vestiges du baroque: L'Origine fantasmée', Vertigo, Projections Baroques, Hors Série, 2000, p. 34, `Mais nous connaissons aussi, au cinéma, les ombres expressionnistes et fantastiques, qui sont les expressions de la profondeur obscure de l'homme, non de son inconsistance.'

* ²⁶⁰ Deleuze, Cinema 1, The Athlone Press, p. 50-51. `Ce qu'il invoque, ce n'est pas la claire mécanique de la quantité de mouvement dans le solide ou le fluide, mais une obscure vie marécageuse où plongent toutes choses, soit déchiquetées par les ombres, soit enfouies dans les brumes. La vie non-organique des choses, une vie terrible qui ignore la sagesse et les bornes de l'organisme, tel est le premier principe de l'expressionnisme, valable pour la Nature entière, c'est-à-dire pour l'esprit inconscient perdu dans les ténèbres, lumière devenue opaque, lumen opacatum.' Cinéma 1, Editions de Minuit, p. 75.

* ²⁶¹ Ibid., `Le baroque appréhende l'ombre pour ce qu'elle implique d'instabilité, d'inconsistance, d'immatérialité. Il lui offre une vie autonome, qui n'est pas menaçante, mais plutôt troublante.'

* ²⁶² Wölfflin, Principles, p. 197.

* ²⁶³ Gilles Deleuze, The Fold, p. 31-32. `C'est un apport baroque: au fond blanc de craie ou de plâtre qui préparait le tableau, le Tintoret, le Caravage substituent un sombre fond brun-rouge sur lequel ils placent les ombres les plus épaisses et peignent directement en dégradant vers les ombres. Le tableau change de statut, les choses surgissent de l'arrière plan, les couleurs jaillissent du fond commun qui témoigne de leurs nature obscure, les figures se définissent par leur recouvrement plus que par leur contour.' Le Pli, p. 44-45.

* ²⁶⁴ Pauline Kael, Hooked, p. 207.

* ²⁶⁵ Stephen Pizzello, `Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, Laura Palmer's Phantasmagoric Fall from Grace', p.64. `He said, «Ron, you did it on the pilot and I know you can do it again». I was getting a little angry at that point. I said, «yeah, but Dave, this is the big screen, it's not going to be on television! The actors are going to have to light themselves!» So he said, «well, let's try that.» I begged and pleaded and got down on my knees, and finally he let me put a little bit of bounce in. I literally took two 1200 Pars and bounced them into the trees; he wouldn't even let me put a white card in! We started off in pure darkness, and then Dana and Sheryl came in with these xenon flashlights. I was able to have the actors point them at each other and bounce the light off their clothes, which were also dark, to provide a little ambient fill. They would point them at themselves once in a while, because they were supposed to be drunk and playing around. So I told them, «play with the light a lot in your faces!» While they were doing that, we would pan the 1200s straight up at the trees to provide some bounce lighting; I'd have the lighting crew pan them into the branches, following the general action of the flashlights, and then pan back out.'

* ²⁶⁶ Pauline Kael, op. cit., p. 208.

* ²⁶⁷ Nochimson, The Passion, p. 33-34.

* ²⁶⁸ Ibid., p. 34.

* ²⁶⁹ Stephen Pizzello, op. cit., p. 62.

* ²⁷⁰ Martha Nochimson, `Mulholland Drive', p. 43.

* ²⁷¹ Deleuze, The Fold, p. 56-57. `Le fond de l'âme, le sombre fond, le «fuscum subnigrum», hante Leibniz: Les substances ou les âmes «tirent tout de leur propre fond.» C'est le deuxième aspect du maniérisme, sans lequel le premier resterait vide. Le premier, c'est la spontanéité des manières qui s'oppose à l'essentialité de l'attribut. Le second, c'est l'omniprésence du sombre fond qui s'oppose à la clarté de la forme, et sans quoi les manières n'auraient rien d'où surgir. La formule entière du maniérisme des substances est: «Tout leur naît de leur propre fond, par une parfaite spontanéité.»' Leibniz, in Deleuze, Le Pli, p. 76-77.

* ²⁷² Michel Chion, David Lynch, BFI, p. 186. `Pourquoi la nuit? Peut-être parce que dans son manteau d'obscurité elle efface les contours des objets distincts et reconstitue le tout perdu. L'obscurité unit et fusionne ce que la lumière sépare. La nuit ressoude ce que le jour a dessoude.' Editions Cahiers du Cinéma, p. 222.

* ²⁷³ Nochimson, `Mulholland Drive', p. 44.

* ²⁷⁴ Ron Magid, `Blue Velvet, Small Town Horror Tale', p. 74.

* ²⁷⁵ Stephen Pizzello, `Highway to Hell', p. 37.

* ²⁷⁶ Ibid., p. 38.

* ²⁷⁷ Ibid., p. 38.

* ²⁷⁸ Buci- Glucksmann, Orlan, Triomphe du baroque, p. 11. `Et cette notion de métamorphose est gouvernée par un axiome baroque, qui est emprunte à l'opéra vénitien: il faut introduire des effets pour engendrer des affects, et ces affects créent des êtres. [...] Je retiens donc ces trois termes, des effets, des affects et des êtres, et ces trois termes constituent le triomphe du baroque, car ces effets instituent les manières comme des opérations infinies et de l'infini.'

* ²⁷⁹ Martha Nochimson, The Passion, p. 146.

* ²⁸⁰ Michel Chion, David Lynch, Editions Cahiers du Cinéma, p. 262, my translation: `Ce qui effraie en elle, c'est qu'il est impossible de savoir si elle joue, ou si elle «s'y croit», comme si elle ne savait pas se freiner, et qu'elle mettait en jeu toute son identité dans le moindre de ses actes.'

* ²⁸¹ Martha Nochimson, `«All I Need is the Girl»: The Life and Death of Creativity in Mulholland Drive.' p. 172.

* ²⁸² Thierry Jousse, op. cit., my translation: `Vivre parler chanter en play-back c'est a dire répéter des paroles déjà écrites en les interprétant différemment, en changeant leur direction, voila toute l'histoire des personnages et du cinéma d'aujourd'hui.'

* ²⁸³ Annette Davison, `«Up in Flames»: Love, Control and Collaboration in the Soundtrack to Wild at Heart.', in Erica Sheen and Annette Davison (ed.), The Cinema of David Lynch: American Dreams, Nightmare Visions, London: Wallflower Press, 2004, p. 120.

* ²⁸⁴ In a recent article in the publication «Celeb Spiritual Report», David Lynch describes the wonders of the Unified Field: `A significant event occurred in my life the day I learned that our human physiology, our body, is made of consciousness. [...] I learned that underlying all matter is a vast, unbounded, infinite and eternal field of consciousness called the Unified Field. I found out that modern science started taking this field seriously about 25 years ago and that all matter is unified at this level in a state of perfect symmetry, or balance. The entire universe emerges from this field in a process called "spontaneous sequential symmetry breaking. [...] "I realized this Unified Field is quite an interesting place. It is not manifest and is full, meaning it is no thing, yet all things in potential. It manifests and permeates all things: the whole universe, everything, while still remaining full and not manifest.' David Lynch, `One Significant Day in My Life', Celeb Spiritual Report, Jan-May 2004, Fairchild Publication Inc, available at http://www.lynchnet.com/articles.html, [14.06.2004]

* ²⁸⁵ Martha Nochimson, `The Straight Story: Sunlight Will Out of The Darkness Come', http://www.sensesofcinema.com/ [08.05.2003].