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

CONCLUSION

It was not the aim of this study to establish whether David Lynch's films are baroque, nor to establish once and for all what a baroque film is, but rather to develop within the specific context of these films the possibilities of a baroque aesthetic. Most of the uses that have been previously made of the notion of baroque as applied to films were imported from the baroque literature. Thus it had developed a certain a number of characteristics which already removed from their visual arts context, lent themselves rather too easily to generalisation.

In keeping close to the formal definition developed by Wölfflin, I tried to investigate films from a visual arts perspective rather than a literary one and thus to reinvest some of the terms attached to the idea of the baroque - such as movement, decorative, accumulative, elliptic, complexity, obscurity, mystery - but within the more specific context of a formal definition and Deleuze's development upon Leibniz' philosophy. This study aimed to find out what those terms would mean to David Lynch' films.

The analysis of the films of David Lynch has approached the possibility of a transposition of the formal principles of the baroque to the cinematic medium. It may have yielded new perspectives in the analysis of films. This study also tried to open up relationships with the more conceptual traits of the baroque, such as has been developed by Gilles Deleuze, to suggest representations of the world according to a baroque aesthetic.

The transposition of the notion of linear and non-linear representation, in the first chapter, rising considerations around the difference between linearity and continuity can be seen as a different take upon the notion of elliptical or circular composition - often associated with the baroque. It seemed more appropriate to Leibniz' ideas and Lynch's films to develop the notion of continuity and micro-infinities. The multiple realms of reality in David Lynch's have often been remarked upon by critics, but the notion of non-linear continuity developed by Deleuze may have call attention to the tight continuous structure of his films in space and time. This approach suggested a possible representation of a world, which while not being linear - or plane - was nevertheless continuous, thus offering an alternative to the opposition of a classical linear continuity and a necessarily fragmented world.

In the second chapter, the study of composition was linked to movement and perspective. Developing upon the notion of the point of view shot in films, it questioned the overall neutral point of view developed by the classical system to investigate the possibilities of a subjective cinema. It suggested the development of the point-of-view shot as a perspectivism which would allows for the multiplicity of the event. The multiplication of possible perspectives allows for the ambiguous integrity of the event to remain.

In approaching the question of montage, the third chapter developed upon the notion balance between form and content which the classical system aims for, and how are symmetries used to contain the progress of the action and ultimately its meaning. This chapter suggested a use of symmetries which instead of closing the gap between actions, makes them resonate - in a kind of action and reaction process - thus opening up the fabric of the film to multiple interpretations. It is echoes by the disequilibrium, which runs through all baroque forms, caused by the tension between the finite and the infinite: `the infinite present in the finite self'.

In the fourth chapter the development of the notion of texture is a more specific approach to the somewhat vague term of decorative. If decoration and accumulation of details is important in the baroque it is because it invests them of a particular importance. It is echoed by Deleuze in the idea of concentration of matter and that life and organism are everywhere. Thus decoration and details are a manifestation of this swarming life. In relation to Lynch's films the notion developed around his love of textures and their importance in the structure of his films

The fifth and last chapter was concerned with the notion of darkness. Darkness and mysteries are often associated with the baroque and this chapter tried to develop upon what makes the baroque darkness. Not the classical darkness where evil lurks, nor a void, the baroque darkness is the potential of all things before its becoming. For Leibniz the depths of the mind are dark because the mind contains the infinity of the world but can only perceive clearly a small portion of it. The darkness in the mind is the dimly perceived infinity of the world. This notion was particularly relevant to Lynch's films and may have suggested new approaches to his treatment of night and dark.

What Lynch's cinema proposes is a highly individual approach to the cinematographic material, reinvesting it with each new film. In his review of Dune, Michel Chion expressed what he found stimulating in Lynch's cinema even when it failed:

David Lynch is not a victim of the pernicious formula, from which come, in my opinion, most of today's academism, which reduces cinema to images and sounds. Passionate for the cinematographic material, he keeps on believing that cinema is also made of faces, bodies, people, visions and words. According to this, he embraces all of this material, which still resist him sometimes, but this resistance to his will to make the work, this resistance that he lets be, give to his work a tension, an intensity a lot more interesting than all the present-day poetics of the artificial.^286(*)

Part of Lynch's approach can be understood by his belief in mysteries of which he talked to Bill Krohn:

For me there is more than one mystery. A mystery is what is closest to a dream. The word «mystery» is exciting. Enigmas, mysteries are wonderful until they are resolved. I believe we have to respect mysteries.^287(*)

This respect for mysteries may lead him to preserve the intensity and opacity of the material he films rather than try to elucidate all possible ambiguities.

The latest passion of David Lynch is for the Internet. He has set up his own website and has devoted himself to its conception for the past few years. He has created some animation and short films for it.^288(*) The possibilities offered by the web may allow Lynch to develop further the form of narrativity which he had been attracted to with the television serial format. It also has the advantage to offer a direct access to the viewer thus bypassing the restrictions Lynch had encountered with television networks.

This interest for cyberspace resonates with the speculations elaborated by Slavoj Zizek from his approach to Lost Highway:

In a closer historical analysis, it is crucial not to conceive this narrative procedure of the multiple perspectives encircling of an impossible Real as a direct result of cyberspace technology. Technology and ideology are inextricably intertwined; ideology is inscribed already in the very technological features of cyberspace. [...] Today we are approaching a homologous threshold: a new «life experience» is in the air, a perception of life that explodes the forms of the linear centered narrative and renders life as a multiform flow.^289(*)

In the same work, Zizek further elaborates on the new possibilities of representation of reality offered by cyberspace:

The final conclusion to be drawn is that «reality» and the experience of its density, is sustained not simply by A/ONE fantasy, but by an inconsistent multitude of fantasies; this multitude generates the effect of the impenetrable density that we experience as «reality». The fantasmatic support of reality is in itself necessarily multiple and inconsistent. [...] We can see now how the purely virtual, non actual universe of cyberspace can «touch the real» the real we are talking about is not the «raw» pre-symbolic Real of «nature in itself», but the spectral hard core of «psychic reality» itself. ^290(*)

However some reservations could be formulated, something that for all its artifices the baroque never forgot: the body; the need for an event to be inscribed in matter; to have a body to realise itself in. Without a body the event remains purely virtual: potential in waiting. Steven Shaviro suggests a different approach to cyber-technologies, questioning their possible interaction with bodily perceptions:

Psychoanalysis is most often taken as a deconstruction of the supposedly unitary bourgeois subject, and as a liberation of the forces repressed within it. I want to suggest that this is far too limited a view; the decentred psychoanalytic subject is not something that comes after the Cartesian bourgeois subject, but something that is strictly correlative with it. In contrast, a new post-human subject will have to point away from Freudian and lacanian conceptions of decentred subjects as much as from the unitary Cartesian one. [...] I think that current technological changes can be correlated with changes in the way we sense and feel our increasingly media-saturated world. And in the longer run these changes will increasingly affect the actual matter of our bodies, as well as the ways we think about our bodies.^291(*)

However attractive the new formal possibilities of cyber-space, some problems remain. Compared to a theatrical release, the distribution of a work through the web will necessarily loose some of its sensual qualities; diminishing the perceptual dimension of the work. Another problem is the formation of a community around the time and space of the reception. A theatrical venue physically brings together a group of people to experience the same film. The television serial gains in repetition what it looses in physical space: it reunites week after week viewers at a specific time therefore forming a community in the continuity of the repetition of the rendezvous. Whether the individualised access to the web can permit this type of synergy is therefore another problem of the cyber-medium.

That new aesthetic forms are emerging is inevitable, but it is unlikely that this will happen without our world of appearances and our body to take place in.

For some time now the idea of an infinite universe has been hypothesized, a universe that has lost all centre as well as any figure that could be attributed to it; but the essence of the Baroque is that it is given unity, through a projection that emanates from a summit as a point of view. For some time the world has been understood on a theatrical basis, as a dream, an illusion - as Harlequin's costume, as Leibniz would say. But the essence of the Baroque entails neither falling into nor emerging from illusion but rather realizing something in illusion itself, or of tying it to a spiritual presence that endows its spaces and fragments with a collective unity.^292(*)

* ²⁸⁶ Michel Chion, `Dune les visages et les noms', my translation. , Cahiers du cinéma, No. 368, Février 1985, http://www.ifrance.com/davidlynch/cdc.htm [03.11.2002].`David Lynch n'est pas victime de cette formule nuisible, source selon moi, de la plupart des académismes actuels, qui veut que le cinéma, ce soit des images et des sons. Passionné par la matière cinématographique, il continue de croire que le cinéma est fait aussi de visages, de corps, de personnes, de visions et de mots. Moyennant quoi, tout ceci, qu'il prend à bras le corps, lui résiste encore parfois, mais cette résistance de ce qu'il filme dans sa volonté de faire oeuvre, cette résistance qu'il laisse être, donne à ses oeuvres une tension, une intensité autrement plus intéressante que toutes les poétiques actuelles de l'artificiel.'

* ²⁸⁷ Bill Krohn, `Lost Highway de David Lynch', trans. Serge Grünberg, Cahiers du Cinema, No. 509, Janvier 1997, http://www.geocities.com/hollywood/2093/lost highway/index.html [16.03.2003]. I could not find the original English transcript so that I had to translate back into English myself: `Pour moi il y a plus d'un mystère. Un mystère est ce qui se rapproche le plus du rêve. Le simple mot «mystère» est excitant. Les énigmes les mystères sont merveilleux jusqu'à ce qu'on les résolve. Je crois donc qu'il faut respecter les mystères.'

* ²⁸⁸ I was not able to view the material contained on his website: www.davidlynch.com/ since I do not have a broadband access to Internet.

* ²⁸⁹ Slavoj Zizek, The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime, On David Lynch's Lost Highway, Seattle: The Walter Chapin Simpson center for the humanities, University of Washington, 2002 p. 39.

* ²⁹⁰ Slavoj Zizek, The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime, p. 41-42.

* ²⁹¹ Steven Shaviro, `The Erotic Life of Machines', p. 29-30

* ²⁹² Gilles Deleuze, The Fold, p. 125. `Il y a un certain temps déjà que s'élabore l'hypothèse d'un univers infini, qui a perdu tout centre aussi bien que toute figure assignable; mais le propre du Baroque est de lui redonner une unité, par projection, émanant d'un sommet comme point de vue. Il y a longtemps que le monde est traité comme un théâtre de base, songe ou illusion, vêtement d'Arlequin comme dit Leibniz; mais le propre du Baroque est non pas de tomber dans l'illusion ni d'en sortir, c'est de réaliser quelque chose dans l'illusion même, ou de lui communiquer une présence spirituelle qui redonne à ses pièces et morceaux une unité collective.' Le Pli, p. 170.