Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 13 Number 1, April 2012
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The Ironic Uncanny, Uncanny Ironies and David Lynch
by
Deakin University Australia
“Or both? Of course both. This is what Lynch is about in his movies: both innocence and damnation; both sinned-against and sinning... And we hate this possibility in movies; we hate this ‘both’ shit.”
-David Foster Wallace, ‘David Lynch Keeps his Head’ (1997, p211)
“They’re heavy, like imagine trying to get a cow in a pickup truck, a dead cow... So this cow was bloated and I wanted to pop it. So I hit the thing as hard as I could with this pickaxe, and that thing bounced and it almost tore my arms off... And we were trying to pop this cow for like a half hour [laughs] and it was farting, and it was foul.”
-David Lynch in Lynch (One) (2009)
David Lynch, famously dubbed “Jimmy Stewart from Mars” by producer Mel Brooks, is no doubt a weird guy, but what kind of ‘weird’ is he? The clean-shaven boy from Missoula, Montana, whose films famously subvert social and filmic norms and unearth psychological horrors, remains something of an anomaly for contemporary criticism. His strikingly opaque, overly-dressed persona in interviews tends to provoke one of two readings – Lynch is either ironic to the point of Socratic, or someone who embraces his propriety in all its unsettling aspects. This is the guy who, to campaign for Laura Dern’s nomination for an Academy Award, sat beside a cow on the interstate with a sign saying “Without cheese, there would be no INLAND EMPIRE.” The scene reads like the start of a joke, but is it funny or freaky, ironic or uncanny? To answer this, and to reconcile certain strains of postmodern and psychoanalytic discourses on Lynch, requires a close examination of those two problematic terms, namely ‘irony’ and the ‘uncanny’. At first glance, the terms might seem distinct – irony as a rhetorical tool of distancing, the uncanny as an affect of uncomfortable proximity; irony pointing ‘outside’ of fixed discursive structures, the uncanny pointing ‘inside’ to established Freudian discourses of the subject. But these techniques or affects, as they appear so frequently and so often simultaneously in Lynch’s films, remain problematic to our reading only so long as they are kept apart. I will argue here that Lynch’s filmic technique reveals both the uncanny dimension of an ironic culture, and the ironic dimensions of the uncanny effect.
Not surprisingly, Lynch has become a lot of things to a lot of critics, particularly those with strong theoretical dispositions. Schaffner is right to note that “Lynch’s films have been appropriated as paradigmatic case studies by a large number of critics” due to their “programmatic vacillation between irony and pathos... parabolic ambiguities and... narrative indeterminacy” (2009, p271). Lynch’s work, then, profits from a wealth of critical interpretations, though his sustained ambiguity often serves as Rorschach test to one’s own critical proclivities. Todd McGowan (2007) and Slavoj Zizek (1997) address this ambiguity from a sustained Lacanian position, the strength of which lies in narratological analysis. Specifically Freudian tropes in Lynch’s works, such as the primal scene (Ishii-Gonzales, 2004), virgin-whore dichotomies (Schaffner, 2009) and the dream-work (Bulkeley, 2003, Thomas, 2006) benefit from close readings. From a postmodern perspective, meanwhile, the emphasis tends to fall on Lynch’s ironic treatment of contemporary America (Rombes, 2004, Ayers, 2004), ideological and medium-specific divides (O’Connor, 2004, Mactaggart, 2010) and the Hollywood ‘dream-factory’ (Nochimson, 2004). Specific analyses of Lynch’s cinematography (Schneider, 2004, Vass, 2005) use of music (Mazullo, 2005) and sound design (Chion, 2006) all point to the manner in which Lynch destabilises ideological and ontological boundaries of sense and meaning-making.
This list is by no means exhaustive, nor should it imply an irreconcilable dichotomy between the psychoanalytic and postmodern positions deployed. Critics on both sides routinely refer to Lynch’s uncanny and ironic dimensions, though few make the interaction between the two the object of their inquiry. Those that do, however, produce arguably the most ‘Lynchian’ of readings; they tend to account for the peculiar effects of Lynch’s filmmaking. Anna K Schaffner, for example, reads Lynch’s installation of a virgin-whore dichotomy as an ironic, subversive strategy (2009, p274) while Sheli Ayers examines our “empathetic response” to human reification, whether by ironic kitsch or social machinations, as an uncanny effect (2004, pp.94, 97-100). Mark Mazullo argues that Lynch’s use of pop and rockabilly music, the disjunct between “a certain uncanniness” in recording techniques and “an almost unbearably naive sincerity” in composition, informs the director’s ironic stance (2005, p493-494), while Steven J Schneider shows how Lynch’s most psychologically unsettling effects borrow heavily from Expressionistic tropes and horror-movie clichés (2004, pp.6, 11). The underlying assumption of these pieces, which I will examine and argue for here, is that the uncanny and ironic function simultaneously and congruently throughout Lynch’s films. To show this, I will examine contemporary definitions and redefinitions of both terms, the contexts in which they operate coextensively and, most importantly, the way in which this position allows us to approach Lynch’s works.
Irony and the Uncanny
“She is my cousin. But doesn’t she look almost exactly like Laura Palmer?” These words, spoken by Michael J Andersen’s ‘Man from Another Place’ in Twin Peaks (Lynch, 1989), refer to the figure of Laura Palmer (Cheryl Lee) seated to his right. Appearing in Dale Cooper’s dream of the ‘Red Room’, the words are back-masked recordings of backwards-spoken words, spoken by a dancing midget whose role, at this point in the series, is inscrutable. The effect is uncanny, to be sure, but the phrase also points to the series’ inclusion of Maddie Ferguson (also played by Cheryl Lee), the “identical” cousin of murdered Laura. In fact, all of the Man from Another Place’s cryptic phrases throughout the series and subsequent film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992) (“This is a Formica table,” “With this ring I thee wed”) self-consciously play on tropes from the series, such as Agent Cooper’s predilection for Adamic “naming” (Ayers, 2004, p93-94) and the complex treatment of love and family within the narrative. Each statement isolates and defamiliarises an aspect of the show, rendering it at once more frightening and unfamiliar. In any one of Lynch’s ‘red rooms’ – the reverse-burning shack in Lost Highway (1997), Club Silencio in Mulholland Drive (2001), even the rabbit room in Inland Empire (2006) – we see a distillation of the films’ key concerns into fragmented, decontextualised phrases, among them “What the fuck is your name?”; “It is all recorded... and yet we hear a band”; “It had something to do with the telling of time.” The process by which the uncanny becomes ironically rephrased, and this rephrasing becomes uncannily invested, is most clearly realised during these sequences. But what does it mean for something to be ‘ironic’, or ‘uncanny’?
Lynch’s filmmaking can be read through both general and specific accounts of irony, both schemes of interpretation and specific literary or filmic techniques. Clare Colebrook’s Irony (2004) unpacks all the permutations of “saying what is contrary to what is meant” (p1), offering a diverse account of several historically-specific definitions of the term ‘irony’. She makes an early, crucial distinction between “verbal irony, as a figure of speech, and irony as an extended figure of thought” (p7) as apprehended by the reader:
Irony is just this capacity to consider a work as a text: as a production that is not reducible to conscious intent or the manifest work. But if we are to give irony any specificity we need to ask just how it is that we can take some texts to mean what they say, and some texts to be other than, or more than, what they say. (p13)
Irony, then, is a rhetorical technique or read affect that catalyses the process of interpretation. It implies a critical faculty by which we stand apart from the text or the discourses it speaks through, to recognise the contingencies within the production of text, subjectivity and meaning. In an increasingly postmodern cultural context, which foregrounds the intertextual bases of texts and meta-narratives (p154-157), ironic apprehension entails analysis of these intertexts, the way in which a work “paraphrases” or “re-reads” its source materials (Worton & Still, 1990, p6-7). As such, we can read for and detect irony within specific instances and the text itself as a mediated and intertextual phenomena.
This kind of reading, however, depends to an extent on the technique and intent of the artist, which can be understood in both rhetorical and psychoanalytic terms. Wayne C Booth situates irony within theories of rhetoric, the manner in which a manifest statement reveals, through its phrasing or contexts, a second, intended meaning. This ironic technique is “intended”, “stable” and “finite” (1975, p5-7) – we might consider the question “But doesn’t she look exactly like Laura Palmer?” to fit this kind of model. But to call David Lynch “stable” would be somewhat disingenuous – I would maintain that Lynch is not someone who says one thing but means another. Frank Stringfellow’s critique of the rhetorical model of irony, that it obscures the essentially contradictory impulses beneath ironic statements and texts (1994, p2-4), leads him to conceive of irony in psychoanalytic terms:
Psychoanalysis insists that human phenomena are invariably the product of contradictory impulses and that careful analysis of these impulses will reveal the opposing elements that went into its making. Irony is obviously a phenomenon that exhibits contradictory elements in its makeup, and one could suppose that it would best be served by a method of analysis that expects and can account for such contradictoriness. (p5)
This perspective allows us to account for the didactic nature of Lynch’s irony, not as a privileging of a latent over manifest content, but an awareness of the instability of both – an essentially postmodern sensibility. Lynch’s treatment of this ‘instability’, however, also points us to the affective dimensions of a psychoanalytic reading – the way in which apprehension of two ‘mutually unstable’ phenomena evokes dread, anxiety and even laughter.
Given this particular, though broadly applicable, definition of irony, it must be noted that the uncanny, at least in Freud’s formulation, is a far more specific term than I or the critics cited have employed it. Freud’s famous essay ‘The Uncanny’ distinguishes the uncanny effect from ordinary dread or terror by locating its source in infantile fantasies and anxieties. Following Schelling’s definition that “’unheimlich’ is the name for everything that ought to have remained... secret and hidden but has come to light” (In Freud, 1919, p223), Freud locates the uncanny effect, wherein “the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced” (p243) as the return of surmounted or repressed psychic content, particularly a surmounted fantasy of “animism” and “the omnipotence of thoughts” (p242) or the repressed “castration anxiety” (p232). In this case, the unfamiliar becomes the ‘all-too-familiar’, and the particular psychic structure through which the subject apprehends uncanny phenomena becomes painfully visible. Even in Freud, however, the effect of uncanny dread does not arrest or delimit interpretation – as his essay shows, the experience of this dread makes us aware of unconscious structures that shape how we see the world, structures that can be analysed and understood. His reading can already account for figures in Lynch such as Eraserhead’s castrating animatronic child (1977) and the claustrophobic, “inter-uterine” spaces of both Inland Empire (2006) and the bulk of Lynch’s oeuvre.
More often than not, however, use of the term ‘uncanny’ in Lynch criticism refers to a certain defamiliarising of the mundane. Specific uses in Mazullo (2005, p494), Ayers (2004, p97), Schaffner (2009, p284) and Schneider (2004, p10) refer respectively to pop music, howling wind, actress Grace Zabriskie and “hyperbolic gross-out shots.” While this may seem oddly inexact, given a textbook Freudian definition, the fact is that the uncanny effect has undergone almost a century of scrutiny within psychoanalysis, literary studies and film theory. The dread described by Freud, the blurring of ontological boundaries of familiar/unfamiliar/all-too-familiar, cannot be isolated in fantastic or terrifying instances – it persists, in varying intensities, in the “silence, solitude and darkness” (Freud, 1919, p251) that accompanies, for David Lynch at least, noise, crowds and light. The overtly uncanny figure of the Man from Another Place is preceded by the subtle, dream-like uncanniness of the Red Room itself, which is nothing but red curtains and a quiet droning ambience. Elsewhere in Lynch, the defamiliarising of telephones, domestic spaces and ordinary dialogue produces some of Lynch’s more memorable sequences. What, then, is the nature of a mindset in which the world at large is both ironised and uncanny?
Sheldon Bach’s clinical piece ‘Narcissism, Continuity and the Uncanny’ sheds light on the diffuse dread and spatiotemporal discontinuities experienced in both narcissistic personality disorder (1975, p76-78) and a more generalised “creative ‘identity confusion’” (p85). In his formulation the narcissist suffers from a sense of discontinuity in their relation to time, objects and relationships (p78) a rendering-uncanny of even the most mundane of things or processes. This incapacity to close the circuit of comprehension, to render things meaningful, is posited as a failure of dialogue between analysand and parent:
we are here touching upon the peculiarly psychoanalytic question of how it is that a person's behaviour comes to have meaning for him. As we know, the narcissistic patient frequently appears to behave normally but complains in analysis that his behaviour feels strange, unreal, disconnected and meaningless. It might be said that he has learned techniques for living, instead of learning how to be human. For if the partner in the dialogue responds to one's feelings, then a link is forged between feelings and events, but if the response is consistently irrelevant, then the worlds of feelings and events remain separated, meaningless and frightening. (p79)
This is not to say that David Lynch is a pathological narcissist, of course – though he certainly qualifies as creative. What is at stake in this reading is not just the creation of meaning, but the proliferation of meaningless, or uncanny objects in Lynchian film. Lynch’s worlds are shot through with stilted performances of cryptic or interrupted dialogue, hyperbolic displays of sentiment, a lingering fascination with random objects and deliberate narrative discontinuity.
As a descriptive account of Lynch’s filmmaking, Bach’s piece highlights both the estrangement from the everyday experienced by Lynch’s characters and audiences, and the fascination that proceeds as a result of that estrangement. Just as the ironic effect is invested with affective dimensions, the uncanny effect is shown to possess a certain didactic force. This experience of the uncanny produces two effects. It foregrounds, first, the aforementioned psychic structure, one of an interrupted ‘primal’ dialogue. More importantly, however, this experience of texts, objects or persons bleached of their fixed, common, ideologically-informed ‘meaning’ forces us to consider these things outside of accepted contexts. If the narcissistic uncanny permeates Lynch’s work at a thematic and narrative level, then we have begun to account for Lynch’s distinct mode of irony. We are estranged from the proceedings at the thematic and formal level; film as the producer of ontologies or ‘windows to the world’ is itself a source of fascination and repulsion, and thus becomes open to ironic reconsideration. When the borders between heimlich and unheimlich become “permeable” (p137), when they are no longer mediated by fixed frameworks of representation, those borders and frameworks are both problematised. The Lynchian spectator is put in the awkward position of having to dread and question at the same time.
Returning to our Red Room, then, with a more qualified definition of irony and the uncanny and the necessary intersections between the two, we may begin to answer the Man from Another Place’s riddle. “Doesn’t she look almost exactly like Laura Palmer?” Yes, because she is clearly actress Cheryl Lee. Yes, because Cheryl Lee will play Maddie Ferguson, a self-reflexive figure of the soap-operatic “identical twin”. Yes – in fact, she looks exactly like Laura Palmer, too much like her and yet, not like anyone at all; Laura has hitherto appeared only as a corpse or in recordings, and yet here she is, “filled with secrets”. Yes, because in this Red Room, whose inhabitants are bizarre and cryptic, everybody looks almost exactly like they ‘should’ – the borders of life and death, subject and object are clearly permeable in this Lynchian world, and the frameworks that sustain these distinctions are ironically destabilised, producing an array of uncanny sensations.
The Contexts of the Ironic/Uncanny: “I can see him through the walls!”
Meanwhile, at the back of a Winkie’s diner, a horrifying homeless person leaps out, startling the man who sees it (Patrick Fischler) to death. The film is, of course, Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, wherein the homeless figure becomes a symbol of morbid, paranoiac fascination. And in a filmic world in which any one thing can be rendered uncanny through the simplest of cinematographic or acoustic ‘phrasing’, the contexts in which we would normally render those things as normal are suspended, critiqued. Todd McGowan notes Lynch’s “bizarrely normal” approach to themes and filmmaking: “By taking up mainstream filmmaking wholeheartedly, he reveals the radicality and perversity of the mainstream itself” (2007, p12). The way in which human beings are made or fashioned into “bizarrely normal” subjects is for Lynch both a psychologically violent and ideologically contingent process.
This has been played out in the director’s treatment of the suburban domestic space, most notably in Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet, wherein uncanny, incestuous forces lay claim to the protagonist’s subjectivity. But these films, in a process Lynch would later make explicit in Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire, necessarily operate and engage with broader cultural contexts, contexts that foreground alienation, objectification and dissimulation. For the uncanny and ironic to intersect, these contexts must foreground the processes by which human beings are objectified and objects are invested with uncanny significance. Perhaps the most significant of these contexts, which foregrounds most strongly Lynch’s irony and the narcissistic uncanny, is the Marxist notion of ‘reification’ which, in a postmodern culture saturated with kitsch objects and unstable subjects, evokes an array of very real, very troubling affects and identifications. These discourses, and the affects they produce, form the cultural backdrop against which Lynch’s filmic techniques operate so effectively.
Reification, in specifically Marxist terms, refers to the ideologically-motivated process by which relations between human beings are conceived as relations between objects, and vice versa. Commodities take on a ‘life of their own’ and, in Marx’s terms, take on “the fantastic form of a relation between things” (in Petrovic, 1991, p463), disavowing the inherently social nature of economic systems. Reification is a more specified phenomenon of both alienation and commodity fetishism, the disconnect of one’s self from one’s possibilities or nature (Petrovic, p11) and the concealment of human relations through fetishised objects of exchange (Fine, 1991, p102). This context is equally at home in the Philadelphia factories of Eraserhead as the Hollywood ‘dream-factory’ of Mulholland Drive. Human beings are reified as objects: “the transformation of human beings into thing-like beings which do not behave in a human way but according to the laws of the thing-world” (Petrovic, p463).
We need never look far to encounter such thing-like beings in Lynch’s works – from heavily-stylised, fantastic creatures to mundane, robotic performances from his central characters, Lynch ironically and obsessively defamiliarises the conventions of Hollywood realism. And yet there is something in these defamiliarised, objectified and fetishised figures that resonates with an everyday understanding of how we relate to the world within a capitalist context. While postmodern theory alerts us to the contingencies behind ideals, peoples and texts, it also necessarily robs these things of any essential qualities through which we might relate to them and to others. At the level of film and the creative text, both mass-distribution and critical postmodernism situate us light years from the author and their intent; art, too, becomes a disembodied object of consumption and appraisal (Johnson, 1984, p51-53). Lynch’s works arguably recognise these issues more than anything else. In literalising and defamiliarising these contexts and the uncanny effects that they produce, his films confront both ideology and ironic distance as paths towards the same impasse of identification.
Furthermore, the capacities of a capitalist society and postmodern ironic culture to reify human beings – as object, as kitsch, as cipher – remain a foreboding threat within the narratives of Lynch’s works. Sheli Ayers (2004) considers Lynch’s work from these perspectives, subverting both commodification and subversion itself. For Ayers, Twin Peaks’ steady accumulation of allegorical codes of reference (p94) turns Lynch’s ironic take on television into “a palimpsest through which initiated viewers experienced a sincere emotional engagement” (p95):
Through a surrealist dream logic, this passionate living-room allegory explores an uncanny cycle of consumption... Using television not only as a medium but also a figure in its own allegory of consumption, the series mirrored the domestic space of its viewers as a space of melodramatic pressure – a space where the body, crowded on all sides by things, perpetually risks invasion by kitsch. (p95)
The uncanny dread that accompanies corpse of Laura Palmer, wrapped in plastic like a supermarket watermelon, problematises our desire to read her death ironically. When Bill Brown writes “the commodification of humans... becomes exemplary of the process of commodification itself” (2006, p178) it is to illustrate the destabilisation of subject/object distinctions that this process inevitably elicits, “the very ontological instability of the artefact itself, the oscillation between animate and inanimate, subject and object” (p199). When people become things, and things take on a life of their own, then the Lynchian being is reanimated in a variety of unique, uncanny ways.
There is undoubtedly nostalgia in Lynch’s work, a yearning to get beyond a postmodern cynicism that is as much of a hungry machine as the industrial wasteland of Eraserhead. But Lynch and his works are mature enough to offer no easy, ideologically-regressive answers. Chris Rodley writes of Lynch’s command of the uncanny:
The mood or feeling that Lynch’s films convey is strongly linked to a form of intellectual uncertainty – what he calls being ‘lost in darkness and confusion’. It is here that the uncanny clearly expresses itself in Lynch’s films. It doesn’t reside in everything that is strange, weird or grotesque, but is the opposite of those things which – by virtue of their exaggeration – refuse to provoke fear. (Rodley, 2005, p. x)
The transformation of ironic detachment into “intellectual uncertainty” opens onto a variety of new ways to read Lynch, ways that foreground the affective charge that remains within the most cynical or detached interpretations of his work. Lynch’s command of the uncanny suggests a profoundly ambivalent engagement with both capitalist and postmodern culture, one most fully realised in the sheer dread implicit within his most ironic sequences.
This ambivalence arguably separates Lynch’s films from their ironic contemporaries – for example, Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994) or the Coen Brothers’ Burn after Reading (2008), which abound with self-reflexive commentary, narrative complexity and generic intertexts. By contrast, Lynch’s overt intertexts draw from a much smaller field – Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950) and Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz (1939) figure prominently. His cinematic style, meanwhile, draws on Fellini, Bergman, Kubrick and Hitchcock (Chion, 2006, p23) as well as horror and exploitation film conventions (Schneider, 2004, p11). As I have argued, however, Lynch’s use of intertext re-reads and represents these sources as uncanny, haunting traces. Where is the boundary between Bergman’s famous split-screen profile shot in Persona (1966) and Lynch’s conscious repetition of the effect in Mulholland Drive? Or, on the other hand, the relationship between severed ears in Blue Velvet and Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (Wallace, 1997, p166)? An ironic reading of Lynch’s intertexts necessarily reveals this blurring of boundaries, an uncanny apprehension of the way in which texts imprint themselves, consciously or otherwise, on the texts we create.
We may answer our abject Bum Behind Winkie’s, then, though unlike the Man from Another Place this figure says nothing out loud. Another figure of abstract authority, like Eraserhead’s Man Inside the Planet and Lady Behind the Radiator (even the naming scheme is the same), the Bum is ‘behind’ the events of Mulholland Drive: “He’s the one that’s doing it. I can see him through the walls... I hope that I never see that face ever outside of a dream” (2001). The appearance of the Bum is undoubtedly uncanny, as one of the film’s “horrible, criminal or excremental figures that embody obscene or repulsive enjoyment” (Thomas, 2006, p83). But certain ironies beneath this horrifying sequence are at play. Lynch’s oft-used “shot/reverse-shot/terrifying-shot” is, as Schneider rightly points out, straight out of a “low-budget” horror film (2004, p12), an effect augmented by both a percussive “whoosh” and the Bum’s sideways movement, clearly the result of practical effects. The uncanny effect is not diminished – indeed, these ironic effects contribute to the palpable dread that the scene creates.
More importantly, however, two dramatic ironies present themselves. The Bum is neither a “he” (she is played by actress Bonnie Aarons) nor “the one that’s doing it”. In a later scene, she is shown confusedly cradling the film’s mysterious blue box, a MacGuffin par excellence, before dropping it alongside the trash. Not only is the homeless figure an “excremental” figure, a corpse-like “object” within a Hollywood of objectification, wheeled onto the stage to terrify the spectator – she, too, has no idea what the blue box represents, even though the box (and its attendant blue key) compel Mulholland Drive’s narrative. The commodified Bum, the blue box and blue key form an inscrutable knot at the centre of the film – ironic in that they mean nothing outside of their functions within the narrative, uncanny in that they reveal nothing, that is, as opaque “objects” they invite our fascination and repulsion.
The symmetry of a supposedly all-powerful Bum, with a box but no key, and paranoiac dreamer Diane Selwyn (Naomi Watts), with a key but no box, is a distillation of David Lynch’s obsession with narrative and ontological paradoxes. The paradox, and the challenge it poses to any mode of rational explication, necessarily creates ambiguities in text and interpretation, ambiguities that can only be experienced as uncanny. Though we can and must assign functions to Lynch’s most inscrutable characters, objects and sequences, we must also note that those functions rely on ironic paradox and uncanny ambiguities in the generation of their peculiar affective and didactic power. As Nicholas Rombes suggests, "If Lynch’s films do not offer an apparatus by which to demystify or reify the Reagan era, then what they do provide, perhaps, is a sensibility that offers an alternative to the binary sincerity/irony reading paradigm that has held sway since the punk era" (2004, p70). This alternative, then, calls into question not only the psychosocial machinations of a commercial Hollywood system, but our own complicity as readers/consumers in approaching texts clinically or ironically. Lynch’s texts resist straightforward psychoanalytic or postmodern readings because of the troubling proximity that is maintained, programmatically, between psychoanalytic and postmodern discourses and effects.
This sensibility informs cumulative patterns of association within and between Lynch’s works – as seen in the repetitions of various ‘red rooms’ and ‘Men in Planets’ as structuring figures, but also in the inclusion of performers (such as Jack Nance and Laura Dern) across films, and the sustained use of electricity, blue light and red curtains as recognisable motifs of transformation and concealment. Suffice to say, given my readings of the Man from Another Place and the Bum Behind Winkie’s, if the most playful of Lynch’s figures can be shown to inspire uncanny dread, and the most dreadful of figures revealed in its profoundly ironic dimensions, then the ironic and uncanny must operate coextensively, if at least within Lynch’s filmmaking and its contemporary contexts.
Throughout this piece, I have sought to articulate a framework through which to understand David Lynch’s ‘weirdness’, tracing the effect of his distinct style upon scholarship, psychoanalytic and postmodern discourses, and the contexts in which those discourses are, sometimes uncomfortably, fused. Lynch does channel unconscious anxieties through his work, but those anxieties necessarily engage in and with the vicissitudes of ironic culture; Lynch is ironic, but his specific use of irony functions through the uncanny defamiliarisation of characters, objects and film itself. That Lynch so often, so obsessively, throws up these obstacles to interpretation – mysterious figures, ambiguous objects, narrative and ontological paradoxes – reveals his fascination with the unknown or unknowable, and the affects they engender, a fascination that lies at the heart of his filmmaking. Cinema, pop music, television and everyday life are simply not the same after an encounter with a Lynchian sensibility – they are revealed, in all their fascinating, ambivalent weirdness, as sites of rediscovered energies and reinvigorated investigation.
Works Cited
Ayers, S (2004), ‘Twin Peaks, weak language and the resurrection of affect’ in E Sheen & A Davison (Eds) The Cinema of David Lynch: American Dreams, Nightmare Visions, Wallflower Press, London, pp.93-106
Bach, S (1975), ‘Narcissism, Continuity and the Uncanny’ in International Journal of Psychoanalysis, Vol. 56, pp.77-86.
Booth, WC (1975), A Rhetoric of Irony, University of Chicago Press, Chicago
Brown, B (2006), ‘Reification, reanimation and the American uncanny’ in Critical Inquiry, Vol. 32, No. 2, pp. 175-207
Chion, M (2006), David Lynch, R Julian (Trans), 2nd Edition, British Film Institute, London
Colebrook, C (2004), Irony, Routledge, London
Fine, B (1991), ‘Commodity Fetishism’ in T Bottomore (Ed), A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, Blackwell Reference, Oxford, p. 102
Freud, S (1919), ‘The Uncanny’ in Strachey, J (Ed), The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 17, pp.217-256
Johnson, P (1984), Marxist Aesthetics, Routledge, London
Mazullo, M (2005), ‘Remembering pop: David Lynch and the sound of the 60s’ in American Music, Vol. 23, No. 4, pp.493-513
McGowan, T (2007), The Impossible David Lynch, Columbia University Press
Petrovic, G (1991), ‘Alienation’ in T Bottomore (Ed), A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, Blackwell Reference, Oxford, pp. 11-16
Petrovic, G (1991), ‘Reification’ in T Bottomore (Ed), A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, Blackwell Reference, Oxford, pp. 463-465
Rombes, N (2004), ‘Blue Velvet Underground: David Lynch’s post-punk poetics’ in E Sheen & A Davison (Eds) The Cinema of David Lynch: American Dreams, Nightmare Visions, Wallflower Press, London, pp.61-76
Schaffner, A K (2009), ‘Fantasmatic splittings and destructive desires: Lynch’s Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire’ in Forum for Modern Language Studies, Vol. 45, No. 3, pp.270-291
Rodley, S (2005), Lynch on Lynch, Faber and Faber, London
Schneider, S J (2004), ‘The essential evil of Eraserhead: or, Lynch to the contrary’ in E Sheen & A Davison (Eds) The Cinema of David Lynch: American Dreams, Nightmare Visions, Wallflower Press, London, pp.5-18
Stringfellow, F (1994), The Meaning of Irony: A Psychoanalytic Investigation, State University of New York Press, Albany
Thomas, C (2006), ‘”It’s no longer your film”: abjection and (the) Mulholland (death) drive’ in Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, Vol. 11, No. 2, pp.81-98
Wallace, D F (1997), ‘David Lynch keeps his head’, in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, Abacus, London, pp.146-213
Worton, M & Still, J (1990), Intertextuality: Theories and Practices, Manchester University Press, Manchester
Films Cited
blackANDwhite (2006), Lynch(One), [DVD-recording], Absurda, davidlynch.com (Distributor)
Coen, J & E (2008), Burn After Reading, [DVD-recording], Studio Canal, Universal Entertainment (Distributor)
Lynch, D (1977), Eraserhead, [DVD-recording], American Film Institute for Advanced Studies, davidlynch.com (Distributor)
Lynch, D (1986), Blue Velvet, [DVD-recording], De Laurentiis Entertainment Group, MGM Home Entertainment (Distributor)
Lynch, D (1989), Twin Peaks: Definitive Gold Box Edition, [DVD-recording], Lynch-Frost Productions, Paramount Home Entertainment (Distributor)
Lynch, D (1997), Lost Highway, [DVD-recording], Assymetrical Productions, Roadshow Entertainment (Distributor)
Lynch, D (2001), Mulholland Drive, [DVD-recording], Assymetrical Productions/Studio Canal, Roadshow Entertainment (Distributor)
Lynch, D (2006), Inland Empire, [DVD-recording], Absurda/Studio Canal, Rhino (Distributor)
Tarantino, Q (1994), Pulp Fiction, [DVD-recording], A Band Apart, Roadshow Entertainment (Distributor)