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

On the Use of Quotes

A few words should be said about the choice of presentation. This work uses a large number of quotes which are divided into two categories. The first set of quotes concerns the baroque and are mostly extracted from works by Wölfflin and Deleuze. They structure - and resonate with - the main text, but they are not integrated into it. This choice was made to avoid an unfruitful mix of too many discourses; the questions of baroque and aesthetics are thus kept close but do not interfere with those of film theory and the cinema of David Lynch.

The second set of quotes, being part of the text, are conventionally used, however if they are given a pre-eminent part, it is in an attempt to keep the diversity in the expression of the different ideas. The quotes are used as voices resounding in harmony or dissonance with each other.

CHAPTER I:

NARRATIVE CONTINUITIES

1

Everything depends on how far a preponderating significance is assigned to or withdrawn from the edges, whether they must be read as line or not. In the one case, the line means a track moving evenly round the form, to which the spectator can confidently entrust himself; in the other, the picture is dominated by lights and shadows, not exactly indeterminate, yet without stress on the boundaries. Only here and there does a bit of palpable outline emerge: it has ceased to exist as a uniformly sure guide through the sum of the form.^40(*)

Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History.

This first chapter will look into the development of and the form taken by the relationship between narrative and cinema and how one form, the classical narrative, has come to dominate the feature length film.

Films have come to be associated with fictional narratives. However, if the relationship between cinema and narratives is almost as old as cinema itself, it was not necessarily so, as Christian Metz commented in Film Language: `The merging of the cinema and of narrativity was a great fact, which was by no means predestined - nor was it strictly fortuitous.'^41(*) The brothers Lumière had rather thought of their invention as a scientific curiosity to record reality; but it is as a fictional narrative that cinema took form with the cinematic experiments of Georges Melies or David. W. Griffith. This led to the situation described here by Christian Metz:

In the realm of the cinema, all non-narrative genres - the documentary, the technical film, etc - have become marginal provinces, border regions so to speak, while the feature-length film of novelistic fiction, which is simply called a «film» - the usage is significant - has traced more and more clearly the king's highway of filmic expression.^42(*)

So narrative cinema is not just a genre in the possible cinematic expressions, it is the dominant form of the medium. The possibilities offered by the narrative form are multiple, but as Bordwell and Thompson remarked in Film Art: An Introduction, one form has prevailed over others, that of classical cinema.

Classical cinema considers a narrative to be `a chain of events in cause-effect relationship occurring in time and space.'^43(*) This is further defined as:

Typically, a narrative begins with one situation; a series of changes occurs according to a pattern of cause and effect; finally, a new situation arises that brings about the end of the narrative.^44(*)

Thus are identified three aspects of narrative: causality, time and space. The characters are identified as the agents of cause and effects; `By creating and reacting to events, characters play roles within the film's formal system. [...] In a narrative, characters are constructed beings.' The authors of Film Art: An Introduction go on to define characters as possessing a certain number of properties or traits `designed to play a causal role in the narrative'. The narrative relies on the stability of these traits to ensure its continuity. ^45(*)

The time and space of the narrative are subjected to the logic of the action. The events are organized in the chronological order offering the clearest understanding of their causality: such as flashbacks or flash-forwards according to need. However, the classical narrative will usually be careful to give the necessary clues to enable the spectator to reorganize the events into a linear chronological order. The same rules apply for space, if space is presented in fragments on the screen to highlight the most important actions; it is nevertheless narratively maintained in its continuity. If, for instance, a character has to cross a long distance between two shots, a narrative clue will indicate to the viewer that some time has elapsed enabling the character to effect his move.

Thus, in a classical narrative, if the plot introduces disruptions in cause and effect, time or space, it ultimately refers back to a linear continuity. Each effect has its cause, the time sequence is restored and the space is Euclidian. Bordwell and Thompson conclude:

Finally, most classical narrative films display strong degrees of closure at the end. Leaving no loose ends unresolved, these films seek to end their causal chains with a final effect. We usually learn the fate of each character, the answer to each mystery, and the outcome of each conflict.^46(*)

This narrative form, which has become, in Noel Burch terms `The institutional mode of representation'^47(*) is, nevertheless, just one possibility of the narrative form in cinema, as Christian Metz asserts:

Filmic narrativity, by becoming stable through convention and repetition over innumerable films, has gradually shaped itself into forms that are more or less fixed, but certainly not immutable.^48(*)

2

In the Renaissance every architectural member was simply and purely stated, while in the baroque, members were multiplied. [...] The single, clear and self-sufficient line was replaced by a kind of formative zone, a complex of lines which made it difficult to recognize the actual contour. This resulted in an illusion of movement, a suggestion that the form had first to move into its allotted position.^49(*)

Heinrich Wölfflin, Baroque and Renaissance.

The critical discourse accompanying the new cinema of the 1960s often remarked upon its departure from narrativity to explain its novelty. In Film Language, Christian Metz developed an analysis of the relationship between the `modern cinema and narrativity' and concluded to the inadequacy of this approach because it is based on the erroneous idea

That in the past the cinema was entirely narrative and no longer is so today, or is so at least to a much lesser extent. I believe on the contrary that the modern film is more narrative, and more satisfyingly so, and that the main contribution of the new cinema is to have enriched the filmic narrative.^50(*)

Metz pursued the same approach elsewhere when discussing the conditions for a change of the narrative form:

The originality of creative artists consists, here as elsewhere, in tricking the code, or at least in using it ingenuously, rather than attacking it directly or in violating it-and still less in ignoring it.^51(*)

The most inventive filmmakers have always used and tricked the code, but, it is necessary to maintain the code to a certain extent to help the viewer to orientate himself; as Metz warns: `A failure of intellection among the viewers would be the automatic sanctioning of a purely individual innovation, which the system would refuse to confirm.'^52(*)

Thus, it is within the narrative cinema itself that new forms of cinema developed, in using the existing code as a springboard, they have presented the viewer with the representation of a less clear-cut world than the classical cinema.

In 1941, Orson Welles made Citizen Kane, which epitomizes many changes within the cinematic form. The film was described by Jorge Luis Borges as `a labyrinth without a centre^'53(*); it revolves around the character of Charles Foster Kane, but without settling on any traits or properties. The character of Kane remains elusive to the end - the final identification of the word «Rosebud» with the childhood's sleigh does not resolve anything, at the most it adds another perspective on the personality of Kane.

Another film articulated around an unfathomable character, is Joseph Mankiewicz's The Barefoot Contessa (1954). It tells the story of Maria Vargas from the point of view of the different people involved. But the film tells more about the narrators than about Maria, she is the blind spot of the film as if the radiance of her beauty was warding off any possible comprehension. The first scene of the film reflects its whole structure; in a Spanish cabaret, a producer and his director wait to see Maria Vargas dance. When she does, the camera moves over the faces of the spectators and their various reactions, from ecstasy to jealousy, but the viewer of the film is left to his or her imagination.

These two films are examples of narratives that cannot rely on the characters traits to play a causal role to further the action, because the characters have no fixed traits. The undecidability of the character personality shapes the narrative: endlessly revolving around a blind spot.

Some filmmakers have taken a more subjective approach to time, not necessarily referred to a linear chronology. Raoul Ruiz' Le Temps Retrouvé (1999) is based on the last volume of the novel A la Recherche du Temps Perdu (1913-1927) by Marcel Proust. Raoul Ruiz did not attempt to explain the events recounted for those who had not read the book, rather he plunged the viewer into the stream of memories and fantasies of the narrator. The chronology of the events is remodelled around the perceptions of the protagonist, as if time had become a malleable substance to be shaped by his stream of consciousness. Accordingly, the opening credits rolls over images of a stream whose waters flow from right to left - which, within occidental conventions of narrative representation is textually understood to mean backward.

The spatial conventions adopted by classical Hollywood films are exposed in Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen's Singing in the Rain (1951). In the film there is only a token attempt at pretending that the space of the action is any other than a sound-stage; there is no spatial relationship between the different spaces. Even for the two scenes happening in the street - when Don Lockwood jumps into Kathy Selden's car to escape his fans and the scene of the title song - it functions as an independent location rather than a junction between two places. The film exhibits and plays on its artificial settings, and even uses them as a narrative element in the scene of the love declaration of Don to Kathy: Don uses the available instrument of a sound stage to set the perfect romantic scene: sunset, gentle breeze, moonlight and so on.

For Dogville (2003) Lars Von Triers set the scene in one huge sound stage with little else other than a few props and lights to make it a little village in the Rocky Mountains. Von Triers' deployment of camera movements ensures that the film has little to do with theatre - from his use of elaborated crane shots to handheld camera.

For Un Chien Andalou (1928) Luis Buñuel used all the make-believe capacity of cinema to conjure up a surrealist space annihilating the boundaries between fantasy and reality: the door of a Parisian apartment opens, like in dreams, on a rocky beach by the ocean.

Thus filmmakers have never been completely subservient to the classical narrative developed by Hollywood, and have used reflexive or disruptive approaches to it. However the classical narrative remains the framework from which other forms of narrative can expand.

3

Essentialism makes a classic of Descartes, while Leibniz's thought appears to be a profound mannerism. Classicism needs a solid and constant attribute for substance, but mannerism is fluid, and the spontaneity of manners replaces the essentiality of the attribute.^54(*)

Gilles Deleuze, The Fold, Leibniz and the Baroque.

From his earlier shorts The Alphabet (1968) or the Grandmother (1970), David Lynch has used the narrative form and has remained within its realm since then. In her book The Passion of David Lynch, Martha Nochimson discusses the influence of painting in David Lynch's films. In this quote she reflects upon the particular influence of Francis Bacon's paintings:

For Bacon, narrative reality is inherent in the way that the image can cut through the static of its own conventions and those of the coherent self to reach the movement of feelings, the energies of the subconscious and the nerves. That is only possible if the artist permits such fissures to occur in the composing process. [...] Lynch's inheritance from Bacon is not his subject matter or color palette or specifics images, but the tension created by the collision between the narrative and the non-narrative elements of painting.^55(*)

The bond between narrativity and David Lynch's work is further commented on by Michel Chion in David Lynch:

Narrative freedom does not mean indifference to the story, which is used as a pretext for saying something else, but rather such an intense belief in the story that like a child, one would like to draw it out as far and as literally as possible.^56(*)

If Lynch has chosen the narrative form, it is as a necessary framework to express the tension with non-narrative elements. Thus developing a personal approach to such elements as the causal sequence of events and their relation to time and space.

Characters in the classical narrative are «constructed beings» ^57(*) with a well-defined set of traits. They are thus quite distinct from the notion of the subject as offered by Lacanian psychoanalysis. The notion is developed here by B. Herzogenrath in reference to Lost Highway:

Lacanian psychoanalysis offers a theory of the subject that does without concepts such as unity, origin, continuity. It goes from the assumption of a fundamentally split subject and thus comes up with a model of subjectivity that grounds itself on a constitutive lack rather than wholeness. Thus, his theory lends itself as a useful and relevant background for the analysis of a sample of cinema that negates the idea of the autonomous, stable individual.^58(*)

This fluctuating identity of the subject was already at the core of the earlier examples of Citizen Kane and The Barefoot Contessa. Lynch however takes a different approach; he is less concerned about the mysteries of identity than by the difficulty for the subject to find a place in the world. As such his characters often seem to conform to type, but then, under changing circumstances they shift their appearances; they may change type. André Bazin analysed the treatment of characters and causality in the film Le Notti di Cabiria (1957) by Federico Fellini. Bazin wrote that Fellini's `characters are never defined by their «character» but exclusively by their appearance,'^59(*) which echoes a commentary of Martha Nochimson on a scene in Mulholland Drive:

Back at Betty's apartment, the layers are reconfigured as Rita takes on Betty's appearance by covering her luxuriant, dark hair with a short, blonde wig. The narrative excuse for this is that Rita is fearful that the murder of Selwyn means that the thugs chasing her are getting closer. But the tonal weight of this image is the move of Rita into Betty's place as the dominant personality, which she becomes when Betty invites her to share the bed rather than sleep on the couch and Rita initiates sex.^60(*)

The change in the relationship between Betty and Rita is thus signified by the wig, a sort of hat of authority. Lynch's characters are exactly as they appear at a given moment but their appearance may change. In Fire Walk With Me, Laura Palmer is a regular high-school girl, a provocative seductress and a disturbed teenager; she is the sum of her images and cannot be reduced to one. In Mulholland Drive, Betty and Diane are one and the same: the hopeful young actress coming to Hollywood and the sour rejected woman seeking revenge. But, the difference is, she assumes a different name for each of her selves, as pointed out by Martha Nochimson:

In life we maintain continuous signs of identity, like our names. But our young inexperienced dreams routinely undergo such transformations, as they collide with forces unleashed by power establishments and our own internal obsessions that a new name and identity would be entirely in keeping with the profound alterations in us, especially the commutation of early assumption about our possibilities.^61(*)

The enthusiastic Betty did not develop her potential to be an actress, which she seems to possess given her performance during the audition, and became Diane, the bitter woman. In Lost Highway the transformative process was more brutal with the violent metamorphosis of Fred Madison into Pete Dayton. There is some resonance to the film in this comment by Bazin on Fellini:

If there are, still, tensions and climaxes in the films of Fellini which leave nothing to be desired as regards drama or tragedy, it is because, in the absence of traditional dramatic causality, the incidents in his films develop effects of analogy and echo. Fellini's hero never reaches the final crisis (which destroys him or saves him) by a progressive dramatic linking but because the circumstances somehow or other affect him, build up inside him like the vibrant energy in a resonating body. He does not develop; he is transformed; overturning finally like an iceberg whose center of buoyancy has shifted unseen.^62(*)

In the first part of the film the character of Fred Madison seems to be under a constant pressure from the inside, a constant ontological difficulty with being. His instability is inviting evil forces epitomized by the «Mystery man». The accumulation of energies that cannot find an expression, literally transforms Fred's body, as if trying on another shape for a fit.

Bazin's thoughts about the relationship between events and characters in Fellini's films seem to be particularly relevant to the films of David Lynch:

Events do not «happen» in Fellini's world; they befall its inhabitants; that is to say, they occur as an effect of «vertical» gravity, not in conformity to the laws of «horizontal» causality. As for the characters themselves, they exist and change only in reference to a purely internal kind of time. [...] Thus the Fellinian character does not evolve; he ripens or at the most becomes transformed.^63(*)

In Lynch's films, if characters cannot be relied upon maintaining their properties, no more can the chain of events to follow a «horizontal» causality. In The Passion of David Lynch, Martha Nochimson develops the concept of the «Eye-of-the-duck» scene, from discussion with Lynch about a poem on the duck shape (see appendix A):

In moving from the bill to the head, down the S curve, around the body to the legs and feet, and back to the bill, we would seem to have the organic form of the duck. And yet Lynch asserts that the secret of the ocular rapture is the eye of the duck, disconnected from the connected lines of the duck's body but the glowing impetus for all the movement that radiates mysteriously around it.^64(*)

Lynch has identified particular scenes from his films belonging to this category, `as a necessary prelude to closure but not in the way that the climax is'.^65(*) In Elephant Man, for instance, it is the scene when John Merrick goes to the theatre to see the musical pantomime. Nochimson interprets this as being the height of sweetness in Merrick's life, sweetness that ultimately can only kill him, since he can never be part of that idealized «normality».^66(*) The scene has no causal relation to the ending, but it nevertheless contains the key to it, the desire for normality.

The narrative structure of Lynch's films does not follow a simple cause and effect reaction; the events portrayed relate to each other in a more layered way. Charles Drazin commented on Blue Velvet:

With its hoodlums and car chases, Blue Velvet has many of the trappings of a Hollywood movie but a different operating system. It has the logic of a dream, where you find yourself in situations without knowing how you got into them, where events and settings reflect an inner rather than an outer reality. It is less a linear narrative than a coalescence of concerns. And in this landscape of the mind, the normal rules of time and space are secondary.^67(*)

Further comments on Lynch's narrative approach are made by Thierry Jousse; after comparing the screenplay of Lost Highway to the film, he observed that most of the scenes which had been cut out had explanatory function:

This narrative trimming has allowed him (Lynch) to reach a disturbing opacity proceeding from a series of striking rhythmic punches. [...] The movie distributes a multitude of signs, clues, enigmas, slips of the tongue, which, as a treasure hunt, seem to mirror a secret lining of reality, who would, like a very active unconscious, permanently appear discontinuous and envelop life in a light paranoiac veil.^68(*)

In avoiding simple resolutions, Lynch's films offer the viewer a multiplied range of possibilities. The event, free from its narrative function, redeploys its singularity, as Bazin commented about the Neo-Realists' films^69(*):

The priority which they [the neorealists] accord incident over plot has led De Sica and Zavattini to replace plot as such with a microaction based on an infinitely divisible attention to the complexities in even the most ordinary events. This in itself rules out the slightest hierarchy, whether psychological, dramatic, or ideological, among the incidents that are portrayed.^70(*)

Lynch's films sometimes give the impression that they might spiral down into one moment infinitely extended, as remarked by Charles Drazin:

Pruned of the narrative strings, an incident which would otherwise have been a flat A-to-B moment takes on depth and richness.^71(*)

Such a moment can be found in The Straight Story as recounted by Michel Chion:

The discovery of Alvin, lying down with all his lucidity, surrounded by friends panicking without doing anything, is the occasion of a scene, oscillating between burlesque and tragic, at risk to go on indefinitely, like Lynch likes them.^72(*)

The characters of this scene know what they are supposed to do, but somehow do not do it, brought to a standstill by their uncertainties. They are not sure of their interpretation of the events; whether or not Alvin really needs help. Another scene in the same film is commented on by Joe Kember in his essay on Lynch. Here he describes Rose Straight at the checkout of the grocery store paying for sausages her father will take on his journey:

Rose attempts to conform to the conversational rationale in the store, but struggles against her speech impediment within the formality of their polite dialogue. Speaking at cross-purposes, they misunderstand one another, and the conversation descends into a series of double takes and non sequiturs. The two women, smiling good-naturedly, pursue a gestural conversation with little more success. The facial expression of each is captured by a series of reactions shots, and the scene draws to an abrupt close when they mug back and forth their mutual dislike for braunshweiger.^73(*)

Thus, the scene shows what a banal exchange at the checkout involves: the conformity to social behavior and the effort required when the body is not perfectly disciplined in this.

Lynch's attention to singular events opens micro-infinities - to echo the term of «microaction» used by Bazin - within the narrative structure. Something like, In Eraserhead, the micro eternity that is folded into the few seconds too long that the elevator doors take to slide shut on Henry.

4

The irrational number implies the descent of a circular arc on the straight line of rational points, and exposes the latter as a false infinity, a simple undefinite that includes an infinity of lacunaes; that is why the continuous is a labyrinth that cannot be represented by a straight line. The straight line always has to be intermingled with the curved lines.^74(*)

Gilles Deleuze, The Fold, Leibniz and the Baroque

The chronology in Lynch's film is generally continuous, which does not mean that it is straight. It means the action is shown in continuity without flashbacks, flash forward or jump in time. There are a few exceptions such as, in Wild at Heart, the flashback of the fire where Lula's father dies, or in Fire Walk With Me, the time gap between the Teresa Banks case and the story of Laura Palmer. Generally, the events happen consecutively in time. What is disorientating to the viewer is the convoluted curves this continuity can take. There is no clear distinction between the different levels in the narrative, as remarked by Eric Bryant Rhodes about Lost Highway:

A large part of what has confounded spectators in Lynch's enterprise is how to distinguish between scenes that reflect the characters' fantasies, and those that belong to the narrative «reality». Lost Highway is a film that would appear to have a complete disregard for differences in ontological levels.^75(*)

The confusion is already there in Eraserhead, in the moments where Henry is in the radiator with the girl. Initially, it seems easy enough to assimilate the radiator to a portal of dreams, but as the film goes on, this distinction becomes increasingly difficult to ascertain.

Blue Velvet presents itself as straightforward enough, but the scenes in Dorothy's apartment, on the seventh floor, have a dreamlike structure. In many respects they do not belong to the same reality plane as the scenes with Sandy for instance - Dorothy's apartment seems to be a projection of Jeffrey's fantasies.

The time structure of Lost Highway is a kind of flattening out of the fantasy curves, all events follow each other but, ultimately, they revolve and end when they started. This loop structure is described by Thierry Jousse:

The time loop of Lost Highway is very strange. Although the film's plot is ultimately linear enough and supposes a chronological succession, everything happens as if the relationship between past, present and future did not follow any hierarchy anymore. Without explicitly changing the chronology, Lynch makes it impossible to identify any given moment.^76(*)

The confusion between past, present, future, dreams and reality is also woven into the narrative structure of Mulholland Drive. Like Lost Highway, the film is split in two parts articulated around one character's change. However this time there is no physical transformation, but an alteration of identity. The first part can be read as a fantasy/dream of Diane Selwyn, but it could also be the past of the second part or, possibly, an alternative future.

The very title of The Straight Story, as Michel Chion pointed out, is a graphic contradiction with its two sinuous capital S.^77(*) By all accounts the film goes pretty much straight down the road through the farm belt country. However this straightforward trajectory is doubled up by the backward movement of Alvin Straight's memory, as he recounts events of his life to people he meets through chance encounters. And what started as a straight journey across fields ends as a sinuous progression through wooded hills. The final meeting of the two brothers, Alvin and Lyle, with its vista of a starry sky, seems to bring Alvin back to a unified self.

In Film Art, an Introduction, Bordwell and Thompson pointed out that whereas `in some media, a narrative might emphasize only causality and time [...] in film narrative, space is usually an important factor.'<sup>78(*)</sup> And the events in Lynch `s films always happen somewhere specific, even if this somewhere might prove difficult to localise. In Lynch on Lynch, Chris Rodley asks Lynch about Twin Peaks sense of place:

Chris Rodley: I wonder if you could elaborate on a sense of place in terms of Twin Peaks. Most American TV series have no sense of place whatsoever, even though so many of them take their names from specific cities or places.

David Lynch: Right. In my mind this was a place surrounded by woods. That's important. For as long as anybody can remember, woods have been mysterious places. So they were a character in my mind. And then other characters came to our minds. And as you start peopling this place, one thing leads to another. And somewhere along the line you have a certain type of community.^79(*)

Talking about The Elephant Man Lynch tells Rodley how he walked around London to find the right place:

Then one day I was walking around a derelict hospital and suddenly a little wind-like thing came and entered me, and I was in that time - not only in that time in the room - but I knew that time.^80(*)

For The Straight Story, Joe Kember remarks that David Lynch completed twice the journey accomplished by Alvin Straight on his lawnmower: `sometimes at mower pace.'<sup>81(*)</sup> Even when the place is nowhere explicit, like in Eraserhead, it is rendered very specifically through an `accumulation of details'.^82(*) All of Lynch's films are firmly grounded in a specific locale and grow out of it - except maybe Dune for which, as remarked by Michel Chion: `Filming acres of sand did not convey the presence of a true, mythical planet.'^83(*)

As was the chronology, space in Lynch's films is continuous; there are very few spatial jumps. When the characters move - Wild at Heart, The Straight Story - the space they cross is vividly present all along. In The Straight Story there is the feel of the tarmac going slowly by, the movements of the combine harvesters in the fields, the change of nature from late summer to autumn and the passage from the flat cultivated countryside of Laurens to wooded hills once the Mississippi has been crossed.

However, in most Lynch's films the characters stay in one place whether Twin Peaks, Los Angeles or Lumberton. But, no more than time could be represented by a straight line, could the space of Lynch's films be represented within a single plane. His space seems to fold itself around particular places that are «nowhere» and where «anything can happen.»^84(*)

5

What makes the new harmony is, first, the distinction between two levels or floors, which resolves tension or allots the division. The lower level is assigned to the façade, which is elongated by being punctured and bent back according to the folds determined by a heavy matter, forming an infinite room for reception or receptivity. The upper level is closed, as a pure inside without an outside, a weightless, closed interiority, its walls hung with spontaneous folds that are now only those of a soul or a mind. This is because, as Wölfflin has shown, the baroque world is organised along two vectors, a deepening toward the bottom, and a thrust toward the upper regions.^85(*)

Gilles Deleuze, The Fold, Leibniz and the Baroque.

These particular places which are «nowhere» are generally recognised by being hung by heavy red drapes. The most emblematic of them is the Red Room of the series Twin Peaks (1990-1991) and the film Twin Peaks, Fire Walk with Me (1992). Martha Nochimson has asserted that:

Lynch has directly stated that not only does everything look and sound different in the Red Room than it would in ordinary reality but also that the Red Room is a different place for everyone who enters it.^86(*)

Thus the room changes properties whether it is agent Cooper or Laura who enters. In the series, scenes in the room with agent Cooper, were acted and spoken backward and then projected in reverse, which gave them that strange forwardness. This accentuated the feeling that in this room the normal rules of time and space do not apply.^87(*)

A predecessor to the Red Room can be found in Eraserhead - the stage inside the radiator with the girl. Whether or not they are part of a dream, both places, the Red Room and the radiator's stage, are usually accessed during the sleep of the protagonist, thus supporting the notion of a dream-place. Other places in Lynch's films are more ambiguous as to their level of reality. They seem to belong to the ordinary plane of reality, but they possess qualities setting them apart.

In Blue Velvet, Dorothy Vallens' apartment is on the seventh floor of an apartment block called Deep River and `it's really close by, that's what's so creepy' as Sandy tells Jeffrey. However, only Jeffrey ever goes there - Sandy is prevented by the «man in yellow» - and the place seems to be in resonance with Jeffrey's fantasies^88(*).

In Lost Highway, the nowhere space is brought even closer as the Madison's bedroom. The bedroom is both at the heart of the house and the centre around which Fred and Renee revolve - it is there that their relationship is made and undone.

Martha Nochimson identifies the nightclub, Club Silencio, in Mulholland Drive as belonging to the type of place like the Red Room:

The portal through which Rita and Betty travel to the next stage of their blighted lives, Club Silencio will remind Lynch aficionados of the Red Room in Twin Peaks, a place, [...] that alters depending on who enters it. For Betty and Rita, it is a site of disintegration.^89(*)

Club Silencio is also where Betty and Rita find the Blue Box that can be opened by the Blue Key found earlier in Rita's handbag:

A spatial black hole opens in the film in the form of a dark passage into a mysterious blue box, which pops up in various scenes, an ineffable portal available suddenly and every so often.^90(*)

If these places have in common drapes and a transformative capacity, they also have to be accessed in a specific way. There is always a passage - a radiator in Eraserhead, a picture of a door on the wall in Fire Walk With Me, a stairway in Blue Velvet or a corridor in Lost Highway - which has to be gone through alone. The passage often takes a ritualistic aspect though repetition; again and again Jeffrey is seen going up the stairway, or the corridor passed through by Fred; signalling a space which is only accessed through certain conditions.

So, paradoxically, space in Lynch's films is, on the one hand, a very specific locale with a great attention given to details and, on the other, places that seem to exist in their own dimension, like a projection space for the characters.

The precise presence of the ordinary plane of reality in time and space is the necessary springboard for the projection into these dream-spaces. This is echoed by the interpretation given by Martha Nochimson in The Passion of David Lynch about Lynch's use of the narrative:

His conscious desire to subordinate the logic of narrative to the subconscious event and to explosive feeling shows how narrative can teach us empathy with the larger forces in the subconscious and the world.^91(*)

In any case, it is on his own terms that David Lynch has used the narrative form; questioning such established notions as the permanence of characters traits, the causality of the chain of events, the linearity of time or the uniformity of space.

In Film Language, Christian Metz concluded his essay on the relationship between narrativity and the new cinema of the 1960s, by pointing out that it was not narrativity that filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard or Alain Resnais abandoned, but rather its institutional mode of representation:

Now, from the moment that the cinema encountered narrativity - an encounter whose consequences are, if not infinite, at least not finished - it appears that it has superimposed over the analogical message a second complex of codified constructions, something «beyond» the image, something that has only gradually been mastered (thanks to Griffith, mainly), and that, though it was originally intended to render the story more living (to avoid a monotonous, continuous iconic flow, in short, to connote), has nevertheless ended by multiplying the modes of denotation, and thus articulating the most literal message of the films we know.^92(*)

Classical Hollywood cinema has developed a system of representation to emphasize the action (to connote) which has replaced the event itself (what was to be denoted). The next chapter will develop upon the elaboration of this system.

* ⁴⁰ Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, p. 19.

* ⁴¹ Christian Metz, Film Language, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974, p. 93.

* ⁴² Ibid., p. 94.

* ⁴³ Bordwell and Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction, p. 55.

* ⁴⁴ Ibid., p. 55.

* ⁴⁵ Ibid., p. 58.

* ⁴⁶ Ibid., p. 71.

* ⁴⁷ Lapsley and Westlake, Film Theory an Introduction, p. 130.

* ⁴⁸ Metz, op. cit., p. 101.

* ⁴⁹ Wölfflin, Baroque and Renaissance, p. 53.

* ⁵⁰ Metz, op. cit., p. 208.

* ⁵¹ Ibid., p. 102.

* ⁵² Ibid., p. 102.

* ⁵³ Jorge Luis Borges quoted in, O'Doherty, Brian, `Kane's Welles, The Phantom of the Opus', Artforum, Vol. 26, December 1987, p. 88.

* ⁵⁴ Deleuze, The Fold, p. 56, `L'essentialisme fait de Descartes un classique, tandis que la pensée de Leibniz apparaît comme un profond maniérisme. Le classicisme a besoin d'un attribut solide et constant pour la substance, mais le maniérisme est fluide, et la spontanéité des manières y remplace l'essentialité de l'attribut.' Deleuze, Le Pli, p. 76.

* ⁵⁵ Martha Nochimson, The Passion of David Lynch, Wild at Heart in Hollywood, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003, p. 22-23, 24.

* ⁵⁶ Chion, David Lynch, p. 103. `Licence narrative ne veut pas dire indifférence à l'histoire, traitée comme un prétexte à dire autre chose, mais croyance telle à cette histoire que, comme un enfant, on veut la mener aussi loin et aussi littéralement que possible.' Michel Chion, David Lynch, Editions Cahiers du Cinéma, 2001, p. 122.

* ⁵⁷ Bordwell & Thompson, op. cit., p. 68.

* ⁵⁸ Herzogenrath, B., `On the Lost Highway: Lynch and Lacan, Cinema and Cultural Pathology', 1999, http://www.geocities.com/hollywood/2093/papers/ [16.03.2003]

* ⁵⁹ André Bazin, What is cinema? p. 88. `Ses personnages ne se définissent jamais par leur «caractère», mais exclusivement par leur apparence.' Qu'est-ce que le Cinéma ? p. 341. Bazin's comments on Fellini's films are often appropriate for Lynch's - furthermore Fellini is a self-acknowledged influence on Lynch: in Chris Rodley (ed.), Lynch on Lynch, London: Faber and Faber, 1997, p.62, Lynch tells Chris Rodley: `I love Fellini. And we've got the same birthday, so if you believe in astrology... His is a totally different time, and an Italian take on life. But there's something about his films. There's a mood. They make you dream. They're so magical and lyrical and surprising and inventive. The guy was unique. If you took his films away, there would be a giant chunk of cinema missing.'

* ⁶⁰ Martha Nochimson, `Mulholland Drive', Film Quarterly, Vol. 56, No. 1, Fall 2002, p. 42.

* ⁶¹ Ibid., p. 41.

* ⁶² Bazin, op. cit., p. 90-91. `Si pourtant les films de Fellini comportent des tensions et des paroxysmes qui n'ont rien à envier au drame et à la tragédie, c'est que les événements y développent, à défaut de la causalité dramatique traditionnelle, des phénomènes d'analogie et d'écho. Le héros fellinien n'arrive pas à la crise finale, qui le détruit et le sauve, par l'enchaînement progressif du drame, mais parce que les circonstances dont il est en quelque sorte frappé s'accumulent en lui, comme l'énergie des vibrations dans un corps en résonance. Il n'évolue pas, il se convertit, basculant, pour finir, à la manière des icebergs dont le centre de flottaison s'est invisiblement déplacé.' Qu'est-ce que le Cinéma ? p. 344-345.

* ⁶³ Ibid., p. 84-85. `Les événements n'y «arrivent» pas, ils y tombent, ou ils en surgissent, c'est-à-dire toujours selon une gravité verticale et non point pour obéir aux lois d'une causalité horizontale. Quant aux personnages, ils n'existent et ne changent qu'en référence à une pure durée intérieure. [...] Aussi le personnage fellinien n'évolue-t-il pas : il mûrit ou, à la limite, se métamorphose.' Qu'est-ce que le cinéma ? p. 338-339.

* ⁶⁴ Nochimson, The Passion, p. 25.

* ⁶⁵ Ibid., p. 26.

* ⁶⁶ Other eye-of-the-duck scenes include: in Blue Velvet, the scene at Ben's place, in Wild at Heart, the accident scene with the girl looking for her purse, with The Elephant Man's one (p. 146), these are the three scenes that Nochimson presents as identified by Lynch. She goes on to identify them herself: the wig scene from Mulholland Drive, In Twin Peaks, Fire Walk With Me, it is the scene where Laura while loading the «meals on wheels» into her car sees an old woman with a little boy wearing a mask (p. 184), In Eraserhead, the scene where Henri walks on the stage and touches the singer (p. 159). In Martha Nochimson, The Passion of David Lynch.

* ⁶⁷ Charles Drazin, On Blue Velvet, Bloomsbury, 1998.p. 122.

* ⁶⁸ Thierry Jousse, `Lost Highway, l'isolation sensorielle selon Lynch', Cahiers du Cinéma, No. 511, Mars 1997, http://www.ifrance.com/davidlynch/cdc.htm [23.03.2003] my translation: `Cet émondage narratif lui a surtout permis d'atteindre à une troublante opacité qui procède d'une série de coups de force rythmiques tout à fait saisissant[...]D'un coté le film distribue une multitude de signes, d'indices, énigmes de lapsus qui par un jeu de piste, font miroiter une doublure secrète de la réalité, laquelle, tel un inconscient très actif, se manifesterait en permanence de manière discontinue et enveloppant la vie d'un léger voile paranoïaque.'

* ⁶⁹ The Italian Neo-Realism was a cinematographic tendency which developed from 1945 to 1960 in Italy. The Neo-Realists paid particular attention to quotidian events and humble characters and tried to find the tragic in the day to day existence of the people.

* ⁷⁰ Bazin, op.cit., p. 89-90. `La primauté de l'événement sur l'intrigue a conduit par exemple de Sica et Zavattini à substituer à cette dernière une micro-action, faite d'une attention indéfiniment divisée à la complexité de l'événement le plus banal. Du même coup se trouvait condamnée toute hiérarchie, d'obédience psychologique, dramatique ou idéologique, entre les événements représentés.' Qu'est-ce que le Cinéma ? p. 344.

* ⁷¹ Drazin, op. cit., p. 123.

* ⁷² Michel Chion, David Lynch, Editions Cahiers du Cinéma, 2001, my translation: `La découverte d'Alvin couché, et qui a gardé toute sa lucidité, entouré de ses proches qui s'affolent mais ne font rien, est l'occasion d'une scène oscillant entre le burlesque et le tragique et qui semble risquer de se prolonger indéfiniment, comme Lynch les aime.' p. 254.

* ⁷³ Joe Kember, `David Lynch and the Mug Shot: Facework in The Elephant Man and The Straight Story.' In Erica Sheen and Annette Davison (ed.), The Cinema of David Lynch: American Dreams, Nightmare Visions, London: Wallflower Press, 2004, p. 19-20.

* ⁷⁴ Deleuze, The Fold, p. 17. `Le nombre irrationnel implique la chute d'un arc de cercle sur la ligne droite des points rationnels, et dénonce celle-ci comme un faux infini, simple indéfini comportant une infinité de lacunes; c'est pourquoi le continu est un labyrinthe, et ne peut être représenté par une ligne droite, toujours la droite devant être entremêlée de courbures.', Le Pli, p. 24.

* ⁷⁵ Eric Bryant Rhodes, `Lost Highway', Film Quarterly, Vol. LI, No. 3, Spring 1998, p. 61.

* ⁷⁶ Thierry Jousse, op. cit., my translation: `Le circuit temporel de Lost Highway est très étrange. Bien que le récit du film soit finalement assez linéaire et suppose une succession temporelle chronologique, tout se passe comme si les relations entre le passé, le présent et l'avenir n'obéissaient plus à des règles de subordination. Sans bouleverser de manière explicite la chronologie, Lynch rend impossible l'identification du moment.'

* ⁷⁷ Michel Chion, David Lynch, 2001, p. 258.

* ⁷⁸ Bordwell & Thompson, op. cit., p. 61.

* ⁷⁹ Lynch on Lynch, p. 162.

* ⁸⁰ Ibid., p. 102.

* ⁸¹ Joe Kember, op. cit., p. 31.

* ⁸² Ibid. p.31.

* ⁸³ Michel Chion, David Lynch, BFI, p. 78. `Les hectares de sable filmé n'accèdent pas à la présence d'une vraie planète mythique.' Editions Cahiers du Cinéma, p.93.

* ⁸⁴ Lynch on Lynch, p. 19.

* ⁸⁵ Deleuze, The Fold, p. 29. `Ce qui rendra possible la nouvelle harmonie, c'est d'abord la distinction de deux étages, en tant qu'elle résout la tension ou repartit la scission. C'est l'étage d'en bas qui se charge de la façade, et qui s'allonge en se trouant, qui s'incurve suivant les replis déterminés d'une matière lourde, constituant une pièce infinie de réception ou de réceptivité. C'est l'étage d'en haut qui se ferme, pur intérieur, sans extérieur, intériorité close en apesanteur, tapissée de plis spontanés qui ne sont plus que ceux d'une âme ou d'un esprit. Si bien que le monde baroque, comme l'a montre Wölfflin, s'organise selon deux vecteurs, l'enfoncement en bas, la poussée vers le haut.' Le Pli, Leibniz et le Baroque, p. 40-41.

* ⁸⁶ Nochimson, The Passion, p. 185.

* ⁸⁷ Rodley, Lynch on Lynch, p. 165-167.

* ⁸⁸ In David Lynch, p.93, Michel Chion develops the idea that the strangeness of the scene between Dorothy and Frank is due to its theatricality, as if they were performing for the voyeur. Later when Jeffrey has sex with Dorothy, she gives him licence for anything he might wish for in asking him: `Do you want to be a bad boy?'

* ⁸⁹ Nochimson, `Mulholland Drive', p. 43.

* ⁹⁰ Ibid., p. 38.

* ⁹¹ Nochimson, the Passion, p. 11.

* ⁹² Metz, op. cit., p. 226-227.