Becoming Lynch, Transforming Cinema

Becoming Lynch, Transforming Cinema Julia Yudelman Research Master Thesis Department of Media Studies Universiteit Van Amsterdam Supervisor: Abe Geil Second Reader: MarieAude Baronian Yudelman 2 Table of Contents 1. Inventions and Interventions: Introducing the Cinematic Environments of David Lynch…………………………………………………………………………...3 1.1 From Auteurism to Invention to Becoming Lynch………………………………….3 1.2 Mapping out a Processual Methodology…………………………………………….6 2. Environments that Lynch: Individuating an Ontogenic Cinema…………….10 2.1 The World(s) of David Lynch Studies……………………………………………...10 2.2 A Film Is What a Film Does: Ecological Worlding in Lynch……………………...13 2.3 In Response to Ecocinema: An Archaeology of Worlds…………………………..16 2.4 Across Films, Across Worlds: Cinematic Environments…………………………...20 3. The Continuing Story of Lynch’s Narrative Environments: Secret Individuations and Dangerous Milieux…………………………………………..25 3.1 Entering Lynch’s Narrative Environments…………………………………………25 3.2 “The dweller on the threshold”: Crystallization in the Red Room………………....26 3.3 “Secrets are dangerous things:” Secret Individuations and Dangerous Milieux…...31 3.4 Becoming Secret, Becoming Lynch: Club Silencio as Theatre of Individuation…..36 3.5 The Genesis of Secrecy……………………………………………………………..40 4. Environments of the Surface: Textures and Texturologies…………………..42 4.1 Constructing an Architexture of Lynch’s Cinema………………………………….42 4.2 From Coral to Cinema: Texture in/as Individuation………………………………..44 4.3 “Feel me”: Becoming Velvet in Blue Velvet………………………………………...48 4.4. The Skin of the Film: Towards a Dermal Texturology of Lynch…………………..50 4.5 The Textural Relations of Lynch……………………………………………………54 5. Coda: Environments of Thought………………………………………………….57 Works Cited………………………………………………………………………………59 Yudelman 3 1. Inventions and Interventions: Introducing the Cinematic Environments of David Lynch 1.1 From Auteurism to Invention to Becoming Lynch In his book Catching the Big Fish, David Lynch tells us, “I like the feeling of discovery. I think that’s one of the great things about a continuing story: that you can go in, and go deeper and deeper and deeper. You begin to feel the mystery, and things start coming” (79). Lynch’s filmography perpetually enacts this principle. When the lights dim and the opening credits flash on screen, from Six Men Getting Sick to Inland Empire, we are sucked into an overwhelming universe that rumbles with mystery, creativity, and weirdness. This powerful Lynchian cosmos is not merely an object to be seen or heard. As a process of becoming, it surrounds us and envelops us as an experience, a feeling, a flow that never stands still. As the films unfold like vast dreams, drawing us deeper and deeper into their ebbs and flows, they change form and change the possibilities of form. In the process they change us as well, touching us in ways we cannot always explain. Rather than attempt an explanation of Lynch’s films, then, we can approach this extraordinary cinema through a different framework. What else do these continuing stories do? How do they continue not only with respect to each other, but within a larger genesis of ideas? Once we begin to engage Lynch in this broader environment, the multiple ways that this cineverse is itself a genesis comes to the fore. Here, I draw on philosopher Gilbert Simondon’s conception of genesis as “a process of affecting the relation of human being to the world at the heart of a system. Genesis permits the resolution of tensions and conflicts because it is a succession of phases ending up in metastable states...the potentials of a system constitute its power of becoming without deterioration” (Michaud 121122). While the work of Lynch and Simondon may initially seem like an unlikely pairing, both share an affinity for such a genesis. For both Lynch and Simondon, thought enters into this process; it does not stand apart from it, but actively contributes to “a system that contains latent potentials and harbors a certain incompatibility with itself, an incompatibility due at once to forces in tension” (Simondon, “Genesis” 300). Whether we view this system in terms Yudelman 4 of atoms or camera angles, tension functions commonly here as “the mark of the development of an inventive potential,” (Chabot 105) providing a rich theoretical opening that, as I will show, harbours its own potentials waiting to be explored. Through and through, Lynch summons Simondon’s vision of the artist as inventor. The inventor does not oppose, but integrates: “he doesn’t seek to attain a specific goal, he attempts to find order and connection across the different worlds that he inhabits” (Chabot 20). In Imagination et invention, Simondon describes how “true invention contains a leap, a power that amplifies and surpasses simple finality and the limited search for an adaption…[thus] it would be partially false to say that invention is made to obtain a goal, to realize an effect that was known in advance” (qtd. in Barthélémy 216). To put it simply, the inventor invents coherence. He or she “works to establish communication, to recover a complete universe that is not lost in a mythic past, but is projected into a still unrealized future” (Chabot 21). With regard to Lynch, we might deem such inventive coherence as that which is Lynchian: a set of relations which express a certain totality that is both singular yet limitless; a cinematic becoming that itself Lynches, whether in the form of a hot cup of coffee, Isabella Rossellini's hair, or the sound of the wind blowing through the trees at night. The seventyyearold American filmmaker David Lynch is less fundamental to this dynamic than may first appear. Indeed, in thinking Simondon for the cinema, the question of who or what the author is opens up, and with it, new potential for studying film at large. Is the inventor an author? Maybe so, but not as classical auteur theory would have it. Largely established by the theorists of Cahiers du Cinéma in postwar France, auteur theory inducted and honored “individuals with strong (invariably masculine) personalities producing art capable of transcending its conditions of production and reception (Andrew 20).” By positing the auteur as the source or origin of a work, classical auteur theory invariably casts the author as external to the text; the individual who creates at a distance. This is not Lynch. Beyond its elitist implications, the figure of the auteur is problematic for my purposes because it cannot account for the way that Lynch enters the continuing story himself, going “deeper and deeper and deeper” towards that which is Lynchian, never distancing Yudelman 5 or pulling away. Auteurism looks only to Lynch as an individual author, when the more salient aspect is the entire process of becoming Lynch that his cinema expresses. Simondon’s conception of the inventor offers a useful corrective here—although it too only tells part of the story. Here it bears mention that Simondon’s context of writing somewhat overlapped with the auteurists of postwar France. Yet where the theorists of Cahiers heralded the individual auteur, Simondon sought out an entire process of individuation. In attempting to “grasp the entire unfolding of ontogenesis in all its variety,” Simondon argued that we must “understand the individual from the perspective of the process of individuation rather than the process of individuation by means of the individual” (“Genesis” 300, italics in original). This project demanded “a philosophy that was supple and mobile, like the process of becoming itself; a philosophy that followed the genesis of things” (Chabot 73). As part of this project, then, Simondon’s figure of the inventor has very different implications than those of the auteur. Chief among them is a shift away from the auteur as glorified individual, and towards the inventor as a relation within a broader process of individuation. From a Simondonian perspective, invention does not hinge on an auteur who turns away or towards the world1; rather the inventor “establish[es] a different relationship to the world, alternative points of connections that can ultimately create new worlds for us to experience” (Kirkpatrick viii, italics in original). For Lynch, a filmmaker whose work continuously puts perception itself into crisis (Thain, “Funny”), it seems unproductive to think merely in terms of an individual with a vision or program, as auteur theory classically postulates (Andrew 23). Instead, we do better to consider how, as an inventor, Lynch is “a man of action… rather than adapt to cold water, he invents a way to boil it” (Chabot 1920). By theorizing invention as that action which is “the very essence of becoming” (Chabot 20), Simondon’s philosophy enables an understanding of the filmmaker who “does not act against the world, but is better understood as working with elements of it to establish new kinds of coherence” (Kirkpatrick ix). Particularly when paired with Lynch, we see potential for this concept to travel even farther, and draw on a different set of artistic imaginings that both engender and build on Simondon. Conceptualizing Lynch as a “man of action” gives way to a new understanding of 1 A recurrent issue in auteur theory. See Andrew’s discussion on page 23 of “The Unauthorized Auteur Today.” Yudelman 6 Lynch as action itself. Likewise, “establishing a different relationship to the world” becomes individuating environments of relationality—environments that remain cinematically in tension, and act as a metastable source for strange new becomings. As a figure who manages this instability or excess rather than overcoming it (Grosz 39), Lynch is an active relation in the cinematic process of individuation that I call becoming Lynch. That means Lynch is not outside the process of becoming Lynch but internal to it—an unstable element that remains in tension with the rest of the system, yet nevertheless resonates with it.

Load more