Becoming Lynch, Transforming Cinema

Julia Yudelman Research Master Thesis Department of Media Studies Universiteit Van Amsterdam

Supervisor: Abe Geil Second Reader: Marie­Aude Baronian

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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. In this way, thinking Lynch as cinematic genesis offers an outlet, not only for teasing out Simondon’s view of the inventor, but also for revising and re­theorizing its conceptual resonance within a cinematic philosophy of individuation. In positing Lynch as an internal relation within a thriving environment of becoming, we ultimately move beyond preliminary concepts such as the auteur and the inventor. The fact remains that, in the end, it is not essential to know who or what Lynch is. The point is, rather, the process of becoming that the films set in motion, a process which Lynch is nonetheless an inseparable part of. In this way, our continuing Lynchian story is of course a conceptual intervention, but more importantly, it is also an aperture into an alternative mode of studying cinema. By challenging our established schools of thought and how they are thought, becoming Lynch is not just another branch in institutionalized film theory—it uproots the entire tree.

1.2 Mapping out a Processual Methodology As Emmanuel Alloa writes, “invention makes appear something that was already there but that we were incapable of seeing” (359)2. As I show in the following pages, Lynch films invent cinematic environments of continuous becoming by bringing to light a different way of seeing environments in general. The next chapter fleshes out this claim by looking to the seed that was already there, but that we were perhaps incapable of seeing. As I show, stirrings of cinematic environments currently exist in the burgeoning field of eco­philosophy, as well as in several areas of David Lynch Studies. Building on this theoretical groundwork, I draw Lynch

2 All translations of Alloa’s article are my own. Yudelman 7

and Simondon together to better develop a framework for thinking cinematically about ontogenesis3, and ontogenically about cinema. Consequently, in lieu of the individual, I foreground the process of individuation. Rather ​ ​ ​ ​ than approach films, genres, people, and ideas as separate and self­contained, I undertake a processual methodology through which various interconnected forces interact, resonate, fall out of step, and become. In traversing this process, I visit and re­visit Lynch’s cinema as a relational genesis from different perspectives. The following chapters are best regarded as individuations in this journey, as opposed to stable categories; narratives and surfaces, sounds and images, beings and becomings weave together throughout the thesis, as they do in the films. I go on to engage the continuing story of Lynch as individuations within a larger theoretical milieu. Rather than map out each film within its own chapter, I focus more intently on the connective rhythms that reverberate through this effervescent cinema. Discussions of different films weave in and out of each other. In Chapter Two, I better ground this methodology in its theoretical context: beginning with the concept of film worlds and ending with a Simondonian framework of cinematic environments, “Environments that Lynch” argues for an ontogenic approach to Lynch’s cinema. Chapters Three and Four put this to work by individuating narrative environments and surface environments respectively. There, I seek to trace the generative action of Lynch’s filmography through both its depths and its surfaces: the secrecy, danger, and violence that permeate Lynchian narratives gives way to an affective intertwining of sound and image as texture. As I move through these actively layered environments, I explore how we might begin to develop a Simondonian mode of film analysis that is equally Lynchian in scope. In contrast to the categorical approaches that dominate Lynch Studies, I see little value in constructing fixed categories for discussing a body of work that refuses to stagnate. Where such approaches tend to rationalize and reify—a tendency I discuss in depth in Chapter Two—my Simondon­inspired methodology attempts to move with the films, in the hopes of further developing the inventive ​ potential in such a methodology, and the tensions that invariably arise within it.

3 A recurrent Simondonian term which Jean­Hughes Barthélémy explains is primarily “a synonym of individuation, because individuation, for Simondon, is a genesis” (219). Simondon himself argues for an expanded definition of ontogenesis as “the development of the being, or its becoming—in other words, that which makes the being develop or become, insofar as it is, as being” (“Genesis” 300). Yudelman 8

In this way, I also look to something in Simondon's work that the philosopher himself may not have seen. In addition to extending, appropriating, and recontextualizing Simondon's philosophy for the cinema, I also revise his vision of an inventor through Lynch as a means of exploring the (not always clear) relationship between invention and individuation. This requires a certain amount of reading Simondon against Simondon. In exploring the internal coherence between Lynch and Simondon through a praxis that is itself metastable, I do not merely conduct a Simondonian reading of Lynch. I am not interested in adding another category, methodology, or ‘ism’ to the tangled branches of the Lynch Studies tree, or the thick forest of academic film studies today. On the contrary, I am attempting to rework the way we approach both Lynch and Simondon by individuating a new system of cinematic genesis, in which the potentials of this system become without stagnation or deterioration. Not foreclosing, but generating, creating, opening up. At some point, this project extends beyond the realm of Lynch films proper, and starts to implicate how we relate to other systems of ideas, art, and action, including those that have not yet been realized. In this sense, the films are not the be all and end all of the discussion. Although they may well be at the heart of this system, they are also a window into a larger sensibility. There, people, film, theory, and all manner of other becomings can be “Lynchian” or “Simondonian” in that they are rife with potential; energized forces in a moving process. For now, however, let us take a brief detour into the shimmering environment of Lynch’s mind. In typical Lynchian fashion, the director writes: To me, every film, every project, is an experiment. How do you translate this idea? How do you translate it so that it goes from an idea to a film or to a chair? You’ve got this idea, and you can see it and hear it and feel it and know it. Now, let’s say you start cutting a piece of wood and it’s just not exactly right. That makes you think more, so you can take off from that. You’re now acting and reacting. So it’s kind of an experiment to get it to feel all correct. (Catching 29) ​ ​ Following this ethos, I take on the role of academic inventor by opening up a different way we can relate not only to Lynch films, but to the broader environment of cinema. Just as Lynch experiments through a series of actions and reactions, I aim to act on the films but also react to Yudelman 9

them. Throughout this undertaking I will draw on my own “hopeful puzzle pieces” (Lynch, Catching 23), allowing ideas to flow in and through the films, and take on new forms in the process. Simondon’s unique philosophy reminds us that “the inventive spirit will always be one step ahead, it will always be visionary, not in the sense where it has a totalizing vision, but because it accepted to fumble there, or nothing is gained” (Alloa 359). Likewise, in the inventive, artistic spirit of both Lynch and Simondon, I attempt an experimental analysis that does not always square—it is far from totalizating. Yet in undertaking such a vision of Lynch’s work, I accept that fumbling is part of the process. Without risks, without mistakes, nothing is gained. In the spirit of Simondon’s philosophical intuition and Lynch’s artistic experimentation, I will “feel­think” my way through (Lynch, Catching 83). I invite you to do the same. ​ ​

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2. Environments that Lynch: Individuating an Ontogenic Cinema

“We emerge from the cinema not as if awakening from a darkened dream into the light of reality, but instead into an experimental night, a re­enchantment of the world in the productive mystery of its potential.” (Thain, “Rabbit Ears” 91)

2.1 The World(s) of David Lynch Studies Alongside Lynch’s oeuvre, David Lynch Studies has grown into its own field of scholarship. The edges of this field are far reaching: irony, ideology, psychoanalysis, schizoanalysis, auteurism, feminism, postmodernism, mysticism, and a host of other ‘isms’ all have carved their place within Lynch Studies4. At some point, the breadth of secondary literature becomes it own object of study, sometimes even outweighing Lynch’s films. Many contributions within Lynch Studies wrestle with this overdetermination, and consequently look for meaning farther and farther outside Lynch’s work, from details of Lynch’s childhood, to comparisons with other media such as painting, to religious paradigms such as Buddhism and Gnosticism. Alternatively, as seen in psychoanalytic accounts, many scholars respond in the opposite direction, by tending increasingly towards the minutiae of Lynch’s films, and searching ever deeper for that hidden layer which others have not yet found. Regardless of the specific method used, most analyses remain within an interpretive or hermeneutic approach to Lynch, driven by the goal of “trying to unearth intellectual contexts for Lynch's films that most have overlooked” (Wilson ix). Embedded in such archaeological terminology is the presupposition that meaning lies hidden beyond the surface of Lynch’s work; accessing it requires careful digging through the thick mud of Lynchian obfuscation using whatever tools necessary. What gets lost in these hermeneutic excavations? Often, to echo Michel Chion, “a series of images, sounds, gestures, bodies and actions which must be grasped literally before any attempt at interpretation” (21). In contrast to the majority of Lynch Studies, I am not so interested in what Lynch’s films mean. This is not to denounce the intentions of the author, the deeply rooted subconscious or message of the films, or even their cultural relevance. As the

4 For an extensive overview of the authors, titles, and topics covered under the Lynch Studies umbrella, see MacTaggart, Allister. The Film Paintings of David Lynch. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ​ ​ 2010. 21­22, as well as Wilson, Eric. The Strange World of David Lynch. New York: Continuum, 2007. x. ​ ​ Yudelman 11

scope of Lynch Studies shows, Lynch’s films offer extraordinary conclusions to be drawn in these areas. Nevertheless, that is not my project. Rather than inquire as to what the films mean, I ​ ​ ask a different set of questions: what do the films do?; how are they productive?; what do they ​ ​ ​ ​ create? Asking these questions necessitates looking squarely at the films themselves. ​ Even so, the overdetermination of David Lynch Studies is revealing as a starting point. If nothing else, the vast range of academic discourses speaks to the films’ capacity to sustain multiple interpretations without being fixed in place. The perplexing beauty of Lynch’s work arguably lies in its refusal to be resolved. By resisting any singular reading, the films open up a large, conceptual space for critical reflection, debate, and experimentation. For this reason, it will still be worthwhile to draw on Lynch Studies for my purposes, both to re­orient the discussions taking place and to forge new connections between them and the films. Specifically, the common tendency to describe Lynch’s films in terms of “worlds” is one discourse that warrants closer consideration. Many scholars relay this idea in passing, as a somewhat offhanded way to designate the immersive character of Lynch’s work. References to “the strange world of David Lynch,” (Wilson) “Lynch’s cinematic world,” (del Río 203) or to specific films such as “the world of Eraserhead” (Yacavone 83) abound in Lynch Studies, if only to be brushed aside all too quickly. Others clarify their usage of the term, positing these worlds as emanating directly from Lynch’s mind. Discourses praising “the filmmaker’s ability to create a private world” (Goodwin 314) often coincide with quotations from Lynch himself, to the tune of “I imagined a world in which painting would be in perpetual motion” (qtd. in Chion 10). Some authors go beyond these claims, and instead see certain films corresponding to certain worlds. Lost Highway, for instance, might be characterized as “a world where time is ​ ​ dangerously out of control,” (Rodley xviii) or “a world characterized by paramnesia,” (Thain, “Funny”) whereas Inland Empire corresponds to a “vibratory world” (Thain, “Rabbit Ears” 100). ​ ​ Other accounts delineate a more complex system of multiple worlds. Michel Chion in particular conceptualizes overarching Lynchian worlds that span across several films. Under this scheme, the attic in The Grandmother “is the first expression in Lynch's work of a parallel world, ​ ​ a world culminating in the Red Room of Twin Peaks…Lynch would [later] find other ways of ​ ​ making us enter other worlds, different from the vertical symbolism governing the world of The ​ Yudelman 12

Grandmother” (Chion 18). In contrast, other perspectives identify multiple worlds coexisting in a ​ single film. The notion of “two worlds” in particular has gained much ground in Lynch Studies: Jonathan Goodwin states that “David Lynch’s films often confront their viewers with separate realities. These separations typically correspond to conventional allegorical interpretation, such as higher worlds of good and lower worlds of evil” (309); Chion writes of “the spectator’s sense of day and night as two separate worlds, each with its own laws” in Eraserhead (54). Still other ​ ​ observations complicate the double worlds idea, instead describing these worlds­within­a­film as interconnected and in flux. Of Eraserhead, Chion also writes that Lynch does not “establish ​ ​ drastic demarcations between the worlds which combine to make up the film. On the contrary, he strives to join and unify them” (42). Some Lynch scholars have even noted some characters’ ability to pass from one world to another, as seen in Inland Empire for example. Alanna Thain ​ argues that “such movement between worlds is signaled by the use of scenes in which Dern’s characters see ‘themselves’ in other worlds; Nikki, for instance, sees herself at the read­through after she passes through the nightclub, or on the streets of Hollywood” (“Rabbit Ears” 95). Goodwin adds that “Nikki moves from one fantasy world into another at the moment of the first one’s collapse” (317). Collectively, these discourses denote another way to conceive of Lynch’s legacy: not only as worlds of film; but also as worlds of thought. In these worlds of thought, several patterns emerge. Following the trends of Lynch Studies more generally, many authors deploy the concept of worlds as part of an interpretive project, in which a Lynchian world essentially means something. The worlds might symbolize ​ ​ good and evil, for instance, or they may attest to Lynch’s role as an artist. Yet a number of theorists seem to hint at something larger in their conception of worlds, towards that which is beyond the realm of interpretation. Within these discussions, Lynch’s films do not represent the world so much as create or become worlds themselves. As Thain aptly notes of Inland Empire, it ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ is a film that “doesn’t look out onto a represented world as through a window, nor reflects a world as in a mirror, but instead shows us a secret coherence of connectivity and texture” (“Rabbit Ears” 88). Daniel Yacavone agrees that Inland Empire dramatises and exemplifies “a ​ ​ passing out of our everyday worlds and the comfort and familiarity they entail, into the perceptually and emotionally challenging ones that a film creates” (99). Still, even the more Yudelman 13

ontologically oriented accounts seem to only skim the surface of the Lynchian world(s) phenomenon. Lynch’s other film worlds have largely evaded due consideration; Yacavone merely surmises that “although the world­feeling of Inland Empire is singular, something similar ​ ​ to it may be found in Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997) or Mulholland Drive (2001), possibly to the ​ ​ ​ ​ extent of these world­feelings being a different variation of the same basic expression” (100). Beyond the general agreement on their existence, there is little consensus on the nature of these filmic worlds. Questions regarding the shape, size, and texture of these worlds, their singularity or plurality, their gesticulation, movement, and interaction remain foggy.

2.2 A Film Is What a Film Does: Ecological Worlding in Lynch The emerging fields of eco­philosophy and eco­cinema can help clear the fog. While the connection between ecological frameworks and David Lynch may not be immediately apparent, it is worth considering exactly what “ecology” entails here. In the last several years, an ecological turn in the humanities has made broad strides in re­claiming the concept. Wrenched from its narrow associations with twentieth century environmental justice narratives, ecology has been reconceptualized by Félix Guattari as a mode of “transversal” thinking across material, perceptual, and social realms (135), or following Timothy Morton, as an open logic of interconnected thinking (The Ecological Thought 4­5). ​ ​ In light of this theoretical shift, a strong contingent of cinema scholars have followed suite. We see a growing recognition that “the cinematic experience is inescapably embedded in ecological webs,” and therefore “all films present productive ecocritical exploration” (Monani ​ ​ and Rust 2­3, italics in original). As Adrian Ivakhiv shows, the “eco” in this ecocritical exploration “does not restrict itself to the material impacts of the production of those images” (vii). Besides considering the material impact of cinema on the earth, there is also the ecocritical exploration of specific films themselves, and how they can “revivify our relationship to the world” (Ivakhiv x). The concepts and methodologies best suited to such investigation remains a matter of debate. To this end, the concept of film worlds has proven particularly relevant for several eco­cinema scholars, much in the same way that the world(s) of Lynch Studies is often a common point of interest among Lynch scholars. Yudelman 14

Yet in contrast to much of Lynch Studies—which often deploys the notion of filmic worlds as a simple descriptor—recent eco­cinema scholarship has rendered the world of the film its own developing ontology. To quote Ivakhiv, “a film is what a film does” (12), and one of the ​ ​ ​ things films do is produce worlds. Yacavone notes that since the 1970s, theorising film worlds was limited to diegetic terms. That is, it was “conceived of ‘as the fictional world of the story’ (Bordwell 1985, 16) that a film narrates, as distinct from acts or processes of narration conceived as external to it (which comprise the non­diegetic). This view equates the world quality of films solely with fictional content” (84). More recently however, increasing attention has been paid to how non­diegetic elements of a film “belong as inseparably to the world it creates and that is experienced by the viewer, as do its settings or characters” (Yacavone 84). In revising the earlier, diegetic­ or representation­oriented theories of film worlds, a new generation of cinema philosophers have looked to the way that, between the beginning and end of a film, the entire “world of the film unfolds” (Ivakhiv 6). Moreover, when a film works on an audience, that audience is taken to places within the world opened up by the film...Cinema, then, is a form of world­production or, as Heidegger called it, of poiesis, the bringing forth of a world. It is cosmomorphic: it makes, or takes ​ ​ ​ ​ the shape of, a world, a cosmos of subjects and objects, actors and situations, figures moving and the ground they move upon. (Ivakhiv 6, italics in original) How a film “worlds” then, also raises questions of the “worldhood (Weltlichkeit) of film,” that is, ​ ​ “the ways in which films construct their own worlds and in so doing assert the ontological property of film’s groundedness’—its dwelling in the totality of its construction” (Pick 21). Here, we begin to approach the sense of a palpable Lynchian totality that so many scholars have commented on: how Lynch’s films seem to produce and inhabit their own cosmos. Yet despite the broad scope of methodologies local to Lynch Studies, such ontological frameworks of film worlding have largely bypassed the field. Rather, as noted above, they have proven germane to some branches of eco­cinema scholarship. These accounts contend that how we enter or journey into the world of the film can have strong ecological repercussions for how we engage with our own world, of which the film's world is a part. Yudelman 15

In following a Heideggarian rendering of “world”—as “a name for beings in their entirety,” (Heidegger 67) understood within “the perspective of being­there [Da­sein]” ​ ​ (Heidegger 76)—a growing contingent of theorists find ecological potential in relating Heidegger's concept of “world picture” to cinema. As Heidegger originally theorized, that we are “‘in the picture’ about something means not just that the being is placed before, represented by, us. It means rather, that it stands before us together with what belongs to and stands together with it as a system. To be ‘in the picture’ resonates with: being well informed, being equipped and prepared” (Heidegger 67). A similar logic underpins the assertion that thinking critically about film worlds can foster a more ecological perspective of our place within a system. Ivakhiv argues that in order to understand the socio­ecological potentials of a film, i.e. “its capacity to speak to, shape, and challenge the sets of relations organizing the fields of materiality, sociality, and perception...we need to be able to conceive of these as being connected, open­ended, and dynamically in process, with ourselves implicated in the processes by which they are formed” (13). Thus the eco­cinema practice of theorizing film worlds aligns itself not only with being “in the picture,” but also with changing that world picture and how we enter into it. For this reason we see a continued emphasis on films designated as progressive or forward thinking. Of particular interest is “how moving images have changed the ways we grasp and attend to the world in general,” as well as the matter of “how we might learn to make them do that better” (Ivakhiv viii, italics in original). ​ ​ All this raises the question, where do the world(s) of David Lynch films fit into this ecological framework? Ivakhiv’s emphasis on bettering our engagement with the world is slippery in its vagueness; it may not be immediately clear how some films “move things in the direction of a more fluid, more animate, more process­relational understanding of the world” (26), or how those films play a productive ecological role. As Morton clarifies: living, acting, and thinking ecologically does not mean succumbing to our dominant mode of “constant machination,” in which “the injunction to get off our backsides and work now penetrates all areas ​ ​ of our lives” (“Dream”). Much of the conversations currently circulating around ecology and the environment too readily fall into this paralyzing mode. More than ever, “ecological data beats you down so that you are unable to move. We desperately need some wiggle room” (Morton, Yudelman 16

“Dream”). To live the data, then, means “you need not only to be able to act and to think, but also to hesitate, contemplate, muse, puzzle, scribble, doodle, read. To dream. We need to start dreaming” (Morton, “Dream”). Enter the fever dreams of the Lynchian universe. Ben’s Blue ​ Velvet rendition of “In Dreams” comes to mind as eerily evocative of Lynch’s overall worlding ​ (fig. 1). The lip­synced lines “In dreams you walk with me/In dreams you are mine” provokes the chilling uncertainty of “whose dream am I in?” (Chion 168)—a question that kindles only more dreaming.

Fig. 1. Ben performing “In Dreams” in Blue Velvet ​

2.3 In Response to Eco-cinema: An Archaeology of Worlds The ontological framework of worlding proposed by eco­cinema thinkers, then, can offer some useful tools for exploring how Lynch films indeed function as cinematic microcosms. At the same time, this decidedly eco­philosophical take on cinema leaves some important questions unanswered. Ivakhiv’s theoretical framework is valuable as an ecology of cinema at large; it investigates how “as we watch a movie, we are drawn into a certain experience, a relational experience involving us with the world of a film” (12). But if Lynch Studies has proven anything, it is that Lynch’s films supersede any one theoretical paradigm; what may be productive for analyzing film in general may not be fully adequate for thinking Lynch ​ ​ specifically. The concept of worlding is certainly useful as a starting point, but how can we make sense of the uniquely twisted way that Lynch films world? Yudelman 17

Upon closer consideration, “worlds” may be an insufficient qualifier of Lynch’s work. Since the inception of Umwelt theory in the 1930s, “world” as an existential concept has ​ ​ struggled with lasting implications of a contained, fixed structure. Paved largely by German biologist and philosopher Jakob von Uexküll, the burgeoning theory of Umwelten [literally ​ ​ translated as “surrounding worlds” (Pollmann 778)] initially held that there is no common world, for every species (and potentially every individual) perceives the world differently and, as a result, lives in a world that is different from that of other living beings… each species or individual is surrounded by a subjective world dependent upon the respective organism’s capacities for action and perception… These individual Umwelt­bubbles envelop every plant, animal, and human like an outer shell or extended ​ body, while simultaneously isolating and separating each entity existentially into quasi monadic units. (Pollmann 778) By conceiving of the biological world as a series of subjective, soap bubble­esque Umwelten, ​ Uexküll’s ideas marked a stark departure from the determinism inherent to nineteenth century milieu theory (Pollmann 792). A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans quickly proved ​ ​ inspirational to a new generation of philosophers, among them Martin Heidegger5. At the same time, the imperfections inherent to Uexküll’s framework persisted as well. Because Umwelt theory relied on the false premise that the environment is generally stable ​ (Tønnessen 48), it could not account for environmental transformation. Consequently it left open the question, “how was such a change of Umwelten—that is, a change of physiological properties ​ ​ and/or sensorial capacities that resulted in a different subjective world—possible, and what sorts of environments, means, or technologies facilitated such shifts?” (Pollmann 781). Heidegger’s revision of Uexküll’s work sustained this theoretical issue of fixed existential boundaries. Specifically, the notion that every animal is bound to its stable Umwelt proved useful for ​ ​ Heidegger, who in turn used Uexküll’s biology to develop the distinction “between beings that simply ‘live’ and those that have what [Heidegger] called ‘existence’ (Dasein). He ascribed to ​ ​ humans the capacity for ‘world­forming,’ while animals are ‘poor in world’ (weltarm), and ​ ​

5 For a strong analysis of Umwelt theory post­Uexküll, as well as a more detailed reading of the continuity ​ ​ between Uexküll and Heidegger, see Pollmann, Inga. “Invisible Worlds, Visible: Uexküll’s Umwelt, Film, ​ ​ and Film Theory.” Critical Inquiry 39.4 (2013): pp. 791­797. ​ ​ Yudelman 18

nonorganic things, such as stones, are ‘worldless’ (weltlos)” (Pollmann 797). In this way, ​ ​ Heidegger continued to apply essentialized, unchanging boundaries to his conceptualization of “world,” even if those boundaries no longer corresponded to those of Uexküll’s subjective Umwelten. In drawing on Heidegger, eco­cinema scholars’ rendering of film worlds continues to contend with such exclusionary principles. Although keen to invoke the concept in a more open, ecological way than his predecessors, Ivakhiv still grapples with the principle of containment that “world” embodies. To be a world, he writes, something “must have structural dimensions holding it in place” (6). Even when we are “taken places” by the film’s world, that world remains necessarily finite, and disclosed between the boundaries of the opening and final credits (Ivakhiv 6). Moreover, adopting Heidegger’s framework to eco­cinema leads to its own set of restrictions: Anat Pick argues that, like animals for Heidegger, most films are “manifestly poor in world” (21); Ivakhiv concedes that even though the subject­object continuum opens up in “every moment of cinematic world­making,” it can also “be remade in every instant. Alternatively, it is one that can be fixed and strengthened over the course of a film and, subsequently, over the course of countless films, genres, and traditions of moviemaking and viewing” (10). Apparently some film worlds are more closed than others. Despite its existential grandeur, “world” as a concept—from Uexküll to eco­cinema—grapples with its own boundaries: what is inside the world versus outside, and whose world is it? Which worlds are worthwhile for scholarly investigation? Somewhere along ​ ​ the way, we lose the intricate yet vast connectivity that is so integral to the Lynch filmography as a whole. A large part of what makes these films necessarily Lynchian is that which unifies them, rather than compartmentalizes them. Seemingly minute details such as the ominous swish of a velvet curtain, the harrowing ring of a lone rotary phone (fig. 2), or the befuddled skepticism of Jack Nance’s facial expressions are so compelling because they haunt virtually every film, drawing them together but also twisting and distorting them in unique ways. On a more macro level we can look to the “abstract cosmic murmur” (Chion 52) that is Lynch’s oceanic sound design from Eraserhead to Mulholland Drive; or the same atmosphere of imminent danger that ​ ​ ​ ​ permeates Fred and Renee’s apartment in Lost Highway, Jeremy Irons’ abandoned film set in ​ ​ Yudelman 19

Inland Empire, and the woods of Twin Peaks. Through it all there is a powerful sense, not of ​ ​ ​ fixed containment, but of constant becoming. “It’s something that is like a magnet to go back in there,” (Lynch, “Interview”) Lynch has said of his work. A useful analogy, we can think of how a magnet, like Lynch’s films, works through forces: constantly attracting and repelling bits of ​ ​ matter and ideas, and taking on new form in the process.

Fig. 2. An unexplained phone call in Mulholland Drive; one of many throughout Lynch’s films ​ ​

The point of exploring these dynamic connections across films then, is not to fit them squarely into some original, fixed world of Lynch. Rather, I am interested in doing precisely the opposite: thinking through how change happens in the films, and what it produces. That means taking the fever dream at face value; grabbing the bull by the horns, and holding on for the ride. Even though it is tempting to refer to Lynch’s films as worlds, the fact remains that we run into tremendous difficulty when we attempt to encapsulate Lynch, even if it is as vast an encapsulation as “world” denotes. Doing so fails to account for how that Lynchian tangibility, that which is so uniquely Lynchian, travels across films. The dream work of Lynch, to recall ​ ​ Yudelman 20

Morton’s “Dream” argument, lies in the resonant connections between films, not in their ​ ​ isolation and containment. And in those dreams, virtually anything is possible.

2.4 Across Films, Across Worlds: Cinematic Environments In thinking through these negotiations, a new concept arises that is immanent to film worlds, yet still offers something new, waiting to be explored: cinematic environments. Surprisingly, virtually nothing has been written about the concept of cinematic environments proper. Yet with regard to Lynch specifically, a theoretical framework of environments in cinema can offer immense potential for thinking through the relational character of these shadowy film worlds. Put differently, the notion of environment can provide a useful corrective to the implications of fixed existence that underpins the film world model by instead looking to how Lynch films form a complex moving system. To put it simply, worlds take place somewhere. For Lynch’s pulsating worlds, however, that somewhere is not a place so much as an environment of unfolding action. Significantly, the concept of environment that I invoke here is best understood within an ontogenic framework ​ rather than an ontological one. Gilbert Simondon’s influential theory of individuation provides an excellent basis for this notion. As a philosophy of processes and forces rather than principles, Simondon’s revolves around the central idea that the individual, whether organic or inorganic, “is not a substance, but the result of a process of individuation” (Chabot 74). Rather than focusing on the already constituted individual, Simondon argues we must first look to the “pre­individual forces [that] pre­exist and make possible the emergence of individuality, those forces which are actualized in the individual” (Grosz 38). These fundamentally dynamic pre­individual forces also constitute the metastable milieu within which individuation occurs, a key component in Simondon’s framework. For an individual to come into being, “there must be an environment [un milieu] for ​ ​ it, a state that is metastable, surcharged, at a boiling point... and then suddenly, there is a taking of form” (Fagot­Largeault 143). Yet significantly, the process does not stop there, “since individuation does not exhaust in the single act of its appearance all the potentials embedded in the preindividual state” (Simondon, “Genesis” 300). The milieu continues to rumble with these potentials, thus providing “the ongoing virtualities with which the individual must engage” Yudelman 21

(Grosz 38). In this way, the individual is always more than itself, “for it is an individual with the ongoing potential to undergo further changes after it is constituted as such” (Grosz 38). Just as in Lynch, nothing is stable. Every close up, every glance, every telephone ring is somehow always more than itself, resonating strongly with the potential for becoming something different. Seen as the “reservoir of becoming,” (Chabot 86) the Simondonian milieu is a well­suited analogy for how I view the cinematic environments of Lynch: “a generative and creative potency…a vitality that is still untamed, a pure nature, a physis, a natura naturans” (Chabot 86). ​ ​ ​ ​ As such this environment is characterized by an inherent tension in force (Simondon, “Genesis” 317). Like Lynchian atmospheres of intense dread and mounting pressure—when Jeffrey hides in Dorothy Vallens’ closet in Blue Velvet, for instance, or when Bobby Peru slides his hand up ​ ​ ​ Lula’s skirt in Wild at Heart, or when Henry’s baby unfurls from its bandaged prison (fig. 3) in ​ ​ Eraserhead—the Simondonian milieu “generates forces which act upon each other, which ​ generate tensions, points of excess, the development of a tipping point or form of emergence, forms of becoming that coexist at best uneasily. These points of instability are the sites around which individuality may emerge” (Grosz 39). Thus although this process may be tempestuous or even violent, always “falling out of step with itself [se déphaser]” (Simondon, “Genesis” 301), ​ ​ there is also an inherent creativity present here. For Simondon, tension is “the mark of the development of an inventive potential” (Chabot 105).

Fig. 3. The Eraserhead baby breaking through its bandages ​ ​ Yudelman 22

Likewise, it is the uneasy tension so characteristic of Lynch films which enables something new to develop, whether an affective response, a change in the mise­en­scène, or a plot twist. Lynch describes his own creative process as follows: I get ideas in fragments I always say. It’s as if, in the other room, there’s a puzzle. All the pieces are together. But in my room, they just flip one piece at a time into me. The first piece I get is just a fragment of the whole puzzle, but I fall in love with this fragment. And I love this fragment, and it holds a promise for more. And I keep it… And then I say having the fragment is more bait on the hook. And it pulls in more. (Lynch, “Interview”) Lynch uses Blue Velvet as an example. He explains that one day, upon listening to Bobby ​ ​ Vinton’s version of “Blue Velvet,” “something started coming from this song. And what came from the song at first was red lips at night in a car. And green lawns with some dew in night. And then the next thing that came was a severed ear in the grass” (Lynch, “Interview”). With respect to Simondon’s theory of individuation, Lynch’s figurative puzzle is useful as a loose metaphor. The point is not how the pieces fit together perfectly (the complete puzzle is off in another room, inaccessible to us), but the process of puzzling: how individual fragments of a larger whole spontaneously emerge; how they “hold a promise for more” and thus contain inherent creative potential, through relating to each other and to the larger whole; and the shapes that take form within that relationality. It is a tense, rocky process—most pieces will not fit together—but nevertheless a creative one, as new structures take form. Significantly, these individuations or puzzle pieces do not just lead to more individuations; they also individuate within, and as part of, an environment that is already brimming with the mysterious potential for severed ears, red lips, and grass dew, among all manner of other possible individuations. It is a Lynchian totality, but more importantly, a totality that is constantly in motion, transforming itself, falling out of step with itself to create something indeterminate, but nevertheless new. In terms of analyzing the films themselves, this perspective has two important ramifications. Firstly, it enables an analytical framework in which diegetic and nondiegetic elements exist on the same plane. People, places, objects, sounds, textures, and so on all constitute pieces of a larger whole, as simmering individuations within an active milieu of Yudelman 23

pre­individual forces. Secondly, theorizing Lynch films within a framework of individuation helps show the error in conceptualizing the films as though moving linearly towards a resolved end point, with Lynch steering at the helm. On the contrary, the films are always in a process of becoming—becoming Lynch. Chabot explains that for Simondon, “the relation has the value of ​ ​ being...the relation does not connect A and B once they have already been constituted. It is operative from the start. It is interior to their being...no substance can exist or acquire determinate properties without relations to other substances and to a specific milieu” (Chabot 77). Within the cinema of Lynch, that means individuations or puzzle pieces are not part of a linear process, but born of a larger, active environment of Lynchian potential. For Lynch himself, those individuations might be Bobby Vinton, a severed ear, and red lips, but for us that “bait on the hook” could just as well be the camera panning down to reveal roses, or Kyle MacLachlan hiding in a closet, or the shimmer of Isabella Rossellini’s blue velvet dress on stage. Regardless, all are made of the same star stuff, as eruptive takings of form due to the metastability of an environment that was always already saturated with Lynchian weirdness, and the potential for becomings. Thus although it may seem as if Blue Velvet represents two different worlds of light and ​ ​ dark (Chion 84) for instance, Simondon’s theory shows that the two could never be separated in the first place. Amidst the green grass swarms a terrifying cacophony of insects; Dorothy Vallens’ suffering is as much a part of “Blue Velvet” as Bobby Vinton’s soft croon; the garishness of Lumberton surfaces again in the Man in the Yellow Suit. All are part of the broader cinematic environment of the film, or even multiple films. It is this same common environment that suggests the velvet in Blue Velvet might be ultimately the same velvet as in the Red Room of ​ ​ Twin Peaks, or that the blazing match sticks in Wild at Heart may have something to do with the ​ ​ ​ fire that consumes Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. As Chabot reminds us, ​ ​ ​ “individuation is a general framework. It allows for infinite arrangements...Individuation is a way of telling the story of life. It is a projective test, in which everyone sees what they want to see” (94). Therefore, there are no wrong connections, as “to exist is to be connected” (Chabot 77). In this way, just as it remains unproductive to delineate some definitive world in which all Lynch films squarely fit, there is little value in accessing the complete puzzle in the other room. Yudelman 24

The value, rather, lies in the process of each puzzle piece individuating within a milieu, and the new forms that emerge in this process. The cinematic environment of Lynch then, is the existential ground on which this ongoing process of individuation takes place.

Yudelman 25

3. The Continuing Story of Lynch’s Narrative Environments: Secret Individuations and Dangerous Milieux

“One is first of all struck by a certain violence in the films and, second, by the fact that it resembles nothing else and works according to no logic we have ever encountered.” (Chion 14)

3.1 Entering Lynch’s Narrative Environments “This oil is an opening to a gateway,” the Log Lady proclaims, clutching her log closely to her chest. Special Agent Dale Cooper turns the glass bottle in his hands, his eyes glimmering as he inspects the opaque black liquid. “Intriguing, isn’t it?” Cooper takes a whiff of the oil, then passes the bottle to Sheriff Harry Truman. “Scorched engine oil!” exclaims Sheriff Truman. Cooper wastes no time moving forward: “Hawk, bring in Ronnette Pulaski.” Ronnette arrives. One sniff of the engine oil and she starts convulsing in fear. “The night Laura Palmer was killed,” she mewls softly. When Cooper and Truman reach the circle of Sycamore trees deep in the woods of Twin Peaks, the tone darkens. Cooper appears as a deer in headlights before growling slowly and uncharacteristically, “Harry, I must go on alone.” Despite Sheriff Truman’s imploring, Cooper removes the flashlight from his hands, trudging alone into the darkness. As Truman watches on from the bushes, Cooper approaches a wall of crimson curtains that has just appeared before him, swaying ominously. He knows his ex­partner­turned­villain, Windom Earle, waits for him on the other side. Cooper enters an opening; the fabric fades away. It is the final episode of Twin Peaks’ second season, aptly titled “Beyond Life and ​ ​ Death.” Defiantly reviving Laura Palmer’s murder after a streak of meandering plot lines, “Beyond Life and Death” marks Lynch’s return to the director role after a hiatus of fourteen episodes. It shows. A very Lynchian patchwork of tense comedy, elusive mystery, and devastating horror weaves throughout the episode, creating a charged narrative environment and a reservoir for strange new becomings. Consequently, the finale of Twin Peaks stands as the ​ ​ climax of the entire series, and the boiling point of a strange universe that has been stewing for twenty nine episodes. Yudelman 26

From a Simondonian perspective, “Beyond Life and Death” is particularly relevant due to its sustained focus on the Red Room, an “eternal waiting room outside time and space enclosed by its red drapes” (Chion 101). Keeping with the Log Lady’s insight, the Red Room scenes provide an opening within the narrative becoming of Twin Peaks, as well as a window into ​ ​ theorizing the enigmatic individuation of Lynch films more generally. Beginning with an analysis of the Red Room vis­à­vis the ontogenic process of crystallization, this chapter explores the stakes of conceptualizing Lynch’s narrative environments as metastable milieux charged with potentials for becomings. Specifically, I consider the Red Room as a metastable narrative milieu, ​ and the individuation of Cooper/BOB as a temporary resolution within that metastable environment—a process that evokes Simondon’s paradigm of crystallization. I also consider the limits of this paradigm. Building on the final moments of “Beyond Life and Death,” I go on to discuss how secrets travel, taking Mulholland Drive as a case study ​ of when these Lynchian individuations exceed the terms of crystallization. Unlike the relatively simple individuation of a crystal within its metastable solution, the narrative individuation of secrets is considerably more idiosyncratic. In Lynch, secrets take on a life of their own. By consistently taking on new form, they open up strange, amorphous spaces in the narrative that brim with dangerous potential. Rather than exhaust that potential, however, these quasi­living becomings continue to resonate and draw from their dangerous surroundings. Borrowing from Simondon’s framework for living beings, I argue that in Lynch’s cinema secrets do not resolve metastability so much as perpetuate it. By propagating and even feeding on unfolding milieux of danger, secrets enacts a Lynchian theatre of individuation. In this way, the individuation of secrets and their dangerous milieux are mutually constitutive relations in the overall activity of narrative movement. Ultimately I conclude that in Lynch, secrets are best conceptualized as becomings in a generative process of secrecy. ​ ​

3.2 “The dweller on the threshold”: Crystallization in the Red Room First, however, let us return to “Beyond Life and Death.” For ten hours, Cooper remains lost in the folds of the Red Room, as this surreptitious milieu gradually transforms from uncanny to terrifying. Nothing is what it seems in this amorphous waiting room. As Cooper passes Yudelman 27

through infinite hallways, he encounters Laura, who becomes the elderly Great Northern concierge, who in turn becomes the Giant. The quiet agitation of the jagged floor tiles, backwards speech, and creeping camera work quickly escalates to full­scale violence. A gulf of roaring flames encroaches the mise­en­scène. Lights begin to flash across Cooper’s face as The Man From Another Place cackles maniacally, like an animal in heat. Laura appears again, eyes clouded over, wordlessly screaming and writhing towards the camera (fig. 4). Cooper stumbles through yet another hallway, this time trailing blood. He finds his lover(s) Caroline/Annie and himself lying half dead on the floor. In desperation, Coop accepts Windom Earle’s offer: exchange his soul for Annie’s life. Windom starts to remove the soul via a stab wound when BOB suddenly infiltrates the scene, snatching Windom by his collar. “He can’t ask for your soul. I will take his,” BOB roars, but he apparently takes both. Windom Earle bursts into flames, Cooper staggers backward. The following moments exceed any sense of narrative (en)closure, as the mounting tension rapidly comes to a head: a cacophony of hysterical howling overwhelms the soundtrack; a second Cooper, eyes foggy and white, bounds after the first Cooper; the lights strobe violently, amplifying the chaos; the second Cooper catches up to the first Cooper, grabbing him; BOB emerges in extreme close up, blurry and out of focus, his beastly laughter swallowing the scene whole.

Fig. 4. Laura Palmer in the Red Room of Twin Peaks ​ Yudelman 28

When Coop finally wakes up in his hotel room at the Great Northern, something is wrong. “I need to brush my teeth,” he states flatly, greeting the concerned Doc Hayward and Sheriff Truman with a cold, penetrating stare. “I need to brush my teeth,” Cooper says again, quieter but also more menacingly this time. “Good idea,” Truman ventures. He and Doc Hayward exchange nervous glances as Cooper enters the bathroom sideways, as if drunk with irritability. Behind the closed door, Cooper glowers before the mirror, and slowly squeezes a tube of toothpaste into the sink. A close up exposes that the twinkle has left Cooper’s eye, leaving in its wake a hard, unfeeling darkness. Suddenly, Cooper’s head rushes forward, smashing against the mirror. A colossal shattering reveals BOB’s face, laughing and bleeding on the other side of the glass: a mirror image of Cooper, and the becoming of the new entity that is Cooper/BOB (fig. 5).

Fig. 5. The becoming of Cooper/BOB in Twin Peaks ​

As the central paradigm for Simondon’s theory of individuation (Chabot 81), the process of crystallization offers some key tools for conceptualizing the unfolding action of this infamous Yudelman 29

scene. Summarized as a sudden taking of form within a metastable state, crystallization refers to “the moment when the nucleus of the crystal takes form; at a given place a form appears and then it propagates… the form in question takes on a depth it did not have before and this is truly an invention which, to a certain extent, simplifies by putting in order something that was once disparate and chaotic” (Fagot­Largeault 143). Significantly, the milieu in which a crystal first forms is amorphous, meaning its molecules are in “an unstable, disordered state, lacking, above ​ ​ all, the periodic order which determines the geometry of the crystal” (Chabot 84). Nevertheless, the milieu is rife with chaotic energy; in order for crystallization to occur, this amorphous, pre­individual milieu must be metastable, surcharged, at boiling point (Fagot­Largeault 143). The appearance of a germ, that is, a “foreign body or shock to the system” then initiates the process of crystallization, providing energy and transmitting a structure to the milieu that it did not previously have (Chabot 83­84). Simondon asserts that “the appearance of a germ in the amorphous meta­stable fluid is ‘spontaneous, and to date inexplicable’” (qtd. in Chabot 83). The point is not what the germ is, but the process it sets in motion. ​ ​ In “Beyond Life and Death,” that process is particularly horrifying. To begin to think cinematically, we can look to the amorphous scene of the Red Room as a filmic milieu boiling over with tension. Laura’s blood­curdling screams, the camera’s endless anticipation of hallways and curtains, the unnerving sway of the jazz soundtrack: all constitute mounting pre­individual forces which supersaturate the Red Room, and precede the individuation of Cooper/BOB. Within this framework, the final shock to the system, the germ that ultimately gives way to the “crystallization” of Cooper/BOB may well be the shattering of Cooper’s hotel mirror: it is the final blow of Cooper’s head against the glass that solidifies his becoming BOB; the point of no return for both his character and the narrative. The episode, and indeed the series as a whole, takes on a sudden depth, a terrifying new structure, that no one could have predicted. The Red Room thus engages in a kind of narrative individuation that is notably akin to crystallization. For Simondon, theorizing crystallization moves beyond a division of form and matter, and instead allows us to grasp “that activity which is at the very boundary of the crystal ​ ​ in the process of formation. Such an individuation is not to be thought of as the meeting of a previous form and matter existing as already constituted and separate terms, but a resolution Yudelman 30

taking place in the heart of a metastable system rich in potentials” (Simondon, “Genesis” 304, italics in original). Like the activity at the very boundary of the propagating crystal, the final moments of “Beyond Life and Death” operate at “the end of the world,” as Windom Earle gleefully sneers to his hostage Annie—at the threshold of form and matter, of being and becoming. Put differently, the horrifying individuation of Cooper/BOB happens at the threshold between the individual and its milieu. As Pascale Chabot explains, the individuation of the crystal unfolds between two realities: the already structured crystal and the inchoate milieu, capable of being structured. For Simondon, the already structured crystal symbolizes being, that which is present and given, while the dynamic, energized milieu symbolizes becoming, a virtuality that awaits determination. (84­85) Within the narrative, this threshold exists between the two realities of Twin Peaks and the spirit realm; between the departure of Cooper’s soft spoken altruism and the arrival of BOB’s blood thirsty vengeance. Meta­cinematically, it is both the end of the series and the beginning of another Lynchian individuation. It is the climactic realization (or better, resolution) of “the dweller on the threshold,” as Deputy Hawk contemplates in the “Masked Ball” episode. In keeping with Simondon’s framework, however, the point not what this threshold ​ straddles, be it form and matter, being and becoming, human and spirit, or the end of a story and the beginning of another one. On the contrary, what matters is the process of individuation that ​ goes on in between the two terms; that which interrelates them. In crystallization, this process ​ hinges on the generative potential inherent to a metastable milieu. Considered a key concept in Simondon’s philosophy of becoming, metastability “is a state that transcends the classical opposition between stability and instability, and that is charged with potentials for a becoming” (Barthélémy 217). Simondon himself emphasizes the importance of metastability in the overall process of individuation, poetically characterizing “the system in which the being proceeds [as] a universe of metastability” (qtd. in Alloa 358). Once again, we see an affinity between Simondon’s vision of a metastable universe, and Lynch’s realization of supersaturated cine­verse. As shown in the Red Room, both are charged with potentials for becoming. Anne Sauvagnargues makes this tension explicit in emphasizing the “aggressive fashion” in which the metastable milieu reacts to the germ, and the ensuing “eruption” of the Yudelman 31

crystal within it (59). Thus at the heart of this affinity is the creative tension, or even violence, that is inherent to ontogenesis. A crystal forms in response to a buildup of tension and potential energy in a metastable solution. In the Red Room, that buildup happens on a narrative level, as the tense, nebulous energy of the scene escalates to a violent metastability. Yet as in crystallization, the tension, chaos, and indeed violence that permeate the Red Room are generative forces, rather than purely destructive. Cooper is not destroyed by this violence but rather becomes something new: the individual of Cooper/BOB. In this sense, the Red Room also serves as a different kind of opening: a window into the vital role of metastability in individuation, and also a more nuanced look at how violence functions in Lynch as a generative force.

3.3 “Secrets are dangerous things”: Secret Individuations and Dangerous Milieux More precisely, in Lynch’s work the forces of violence never stop generating. Even ​ though the season closes, so to speak, on the haunting image of Cooper/BOB, Twin Peaks itself ​ ​ has not stopped individuating. To recall Lynch’s metaphor, there is still bait on the hook; the promise for more. What has formed, and will continue to propagate, is a secret: the secret becoming of Cooper/BOB behind the bathroom door. Although the narrative tension may be briefly resolved when Cooper/BOB rears his ugly head, the secret of his becoming is not. Instead, Lynch leaves this secret unresolved in “Beyond Life and Death,” prompting nightmarish projections of all the horrific violence yet to come as long as Cooper/BOB remains secret, as he did for so long with his previous vehicle Leland Palmer. For now, the secret continues to perpetuate, with no resolution in sight. “Secrets are dangerous things,” Coop warns Audrey Horne in the sixth episode of Season One. Beyond Twin Peaks, Lynch’s films confirm this principle time and again. Think of Jeffrey ​ ​ Beaumont hiding in Dorothy Vallens’ closet in Blue Velvet, generating a secret that draws ​ ​ Jeffrey deep into a criminal underworld of fear and sexual violence. In Eraserhead, a bubbling ​ ​ ooze literally engulfs Henry and his secret lover as they embrace. In Wild at Heart, the secret of ​ ​ how Lula’s father died becomes a raging inferno that haunts the entire film (fig. 6). The list goes on, as countless secrets across Lynch’s universe inevitably incite danger, darkness, and violence. Yudelman 32

Yet Cooper never elaborates: secrets are dangerous things, but what kind of “things” are they, and how do they become dangerous?

Fig. 6. The night Lula’s father was killed; a secret that burns through all of Wild at Heart ​

As a concept, danger resonates with several aspects of Simondon’s pre­individual milieu. “Danger” signifies the possibility of suffering harm (Oxford). Danger harbours the potential for suffering harm, but it is an amorphous, anticipatory suffering: to be in danger means that it is unclear when or how harm will arise, but nevertheless it remains possible, or even likely to occur. Danger conveys the dread of “not yet.” In Simondonian terms, we might say danger acts as a chaotic milieu that is “not yet individuated: it is ‘pre­individual.’ It is awaiting individuation; the necessary energetic conditions have already been met; all it lacks is a germ to initiate the process” (Chabot 86). A secret then, is one possible individuation within this dangerous milieu: secrets are born of danger, and in turn they lead to more danger, more environments that brim with the potential of dark becomings, with the potential for more secrets. Within these dangerous environments, secrets seem to take on a life of their own: breeding, evolving, mutating into something more dangerous than they were before. In Twin Peaks, Laura Palmer is more than the ​ ​ bearer of secrets; she is also the victim of them. The danger she ultimately succumbs to, however, is much larger than her, and continues to haunt the entire town after her death. It is within this larger narrative environment that “Beyond Life and Death” unfolds, as the same Yudelman 33

secret becoming (BOB) who destroyed Laura now overtakes Cooper, provoking new prospects of the violence yet to come. The paradigm of crystallization is somewhat limited here. The individuation of a crystal is a resolution within a metastable system; it “simplifies by putting in order something which was once disparate and chaotic” (Fagot­Largeault 143). Simondon suggests that “if this simplification is total, then individuation stops...If the simplification is total, that is to say if complete order over the whole field is established, then that is death so to speak” (Fagot­Largeault 143­144). This is, of course, far from the case in “Beyond Life and Death,” as the episode title suggests. Far from establishing order over the series, Cooper becoming Cooper/BOB perpetuates chaos, and an ongoing process of individuation within that chaos. Simondon does acknowledge, however, that simplification is not necessarily total in crystallization: The phenomenon of growth is subsequently automatic and indefinite, all the successive layers of the crystal having the capacity to structure the amorphous milieu that surrounds them, as long as this milieu remains metastable; in this sense, a crystal is endowed with an indefinite power of expansion; a crystal can have its growth halted, but never completed, and it can always continue to grow if it is put back in a metastable milieu that it can structure6. (Simondon, L’individuation à la lumière 86­87) ​ ​ Yet “growth” [croissance] is not necessarily an accurate term to describe the individuation of ​ ​ secrets in Lynch. Secrets do not merely grow or expand; they evolve, transform, and propagate in all sorts of twisted, terrifying, and unexpected ways. Like Cooper’s cup of coffee in the Red Room, which passes spontaneously from liquid, to solid, to plasma, to a flat two­dimensional state (fig. 7), there is no telling how a secret will mutate within the narrative. This indeterminacy hinges on inchoate surroundings: Cooper’s restless cup of coffee could only exist in the strange milieu of the Red Room; its shape­shifting resonates strongly with the amorphous environmental tension that surrounds it. The same can be said of the secret becoming of Cooper/BOB. It is not so much that this secret grows, but rather “there always remains an element that is blurred, there ​ ​ always remains an element of metastability and hence the possibility of moving towards other

6 Unless otherwise noted, all translations of this text are my own. ​ Yudelman 34

structurations eventually more complete, or towards an eventual destruction and a different structuration” (Fagot­Largeault 144). With regard to Lynch, we might phrase this dynamic as there being an inherent danger to secrets; when a secret forms, an indeterminate anticipation of ​ ​ violence continues to supersaturate the narrative environment. In the case of “Beyond Life and Death,” there remains the possibility that Cooper/BOB will secretly infiltrate Twin Peaks, or worse, that BOB will destroy Cooper and covertly move on to another vehicle, continuing to feed on the very danger generated by this process. In this sense, the individuation of secrets in Lynch resonates strongly with Simondon’s discussion of living beings. As Barthélémy clarifies, “the difference between the physical ​ ​ individual and the living individual is therefore that the second entertains within it a metastability, whereas the first has become stable and exhausted its potentials. Life is for Simondon a ‘perpetual individuation’” (217). For Simondon, the living being “possesses a ​ complex and durable individuality; its associated milieu participates in its being, which is therefore a ‘theatre of individuation’ rather than simply the ‘result of individuation like the crystal or the molecule’” (Barthélémy 213). In Twin Peaks, we can think of how the entire ​ ​ narrative fluctuates as a theatre of individuation, brimming with secrets, danger, and other dark forces. Over the course of two seasons and counting, Twin Peaks produces an environment that ​ ​ abounds with tension, as if the series is constantly at boiling point but never evaporates. This continually metastable environment participates in the perpetual individuation of secrets which, in Twin Peaks, indeed take on a life of their own. ​ ​

Fig. 7. Coop’s coffee cup in the Red Room of Twin Peaks ​ Yudelman 35

At the same time, these Lynchian secrets are not totally alive. More precisely, secrets cannot be reduced to living beings in Lynch. Although the secret individuation in the final scene of “Beyond Life and Death” temporarily takes the form of Cooper/BOB, it is not reducible to this being either; it is always “more than itself” (Grosz 38). Following a Simondonian framework, the secret is better understood as a movement within an entire narrative process—a process that implicates both the individual and its milieu. As Simondon notes, individuation “not only brings the individual to light but also the individual­milieu dyad. In this way, the individual possesses only a relative existence in two senses: because it does not represent the totality of the being, and because it is merely the result of a phase in the being’s development” (“Genesis” 300). Cooper/BOB is only the tip of the iceberg; the dangerous milieu in which this secret individuation unfolds is secret as well. Bound to a covert time and place in the Twin Peaks woods, the Red Room is shrouded from view; its red curtains literally veil knowledge of the action that takes place within. Moreover, the goings­on of the Red Room also bear witness to a meta­cinematic process of secrecy, as if Twin Peaks itself were keeping something from us, ​ ​ drawing us deeper into the narrative without ever fully revealing itself. Thus, as part of a broader cinematic environment, the individuation of secrets and their dangerous milieux cannot be parsed. Secrets are dangerous; they do not merely engage with ​ ​ danger, as if it were something external to them. Rather, the two terms form a dyad. They are mutually constitutive, two necessary relations in the same process of narrative unfolding. Such a Simondonion perspective may help illuminate how the secret/dangerous action that goes on in the Red Room does not solely concern BOB, Cooper, or Windom Earle on their wild goose chase. The action also encompasses the filmic environment itself, and the pre­individual forces that permeate it. Significantly, these forces are not exhausted by the individuation of Cooper/BOB. Like the outward propagation of the crystal or the perpetual individuation of the living being, the dark becomings of “Beyond Life and Death” are not limited to the singular context of the Red Room or even Twin Peaks. As David Bowie croons in Lost Highway, “it’s funny how secrets travel.” ​ ​ ​ ​ Secret reverberations span across the Lynch filmography, individuating through people, places, and objects alike. The insatiable fire that BOB unleashes on Windom Earle, for instance, Yudelman 36

continues to burn brightly in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, and throughout the matchstick ​ ​ romance of Wild at Heart. Likewise, the monochrome floor that Cooper traverses in the Red ​ ​ Room reappears in Henry’s ghostly apartment building in Eraserhead. Broader examples include ​ ​ how Angelo Badalamenti’s orchestral signature, felt so strongly in the Red Room, inevitably snakes it way through most Lynch soundtracks. To be sure, these are not necessarily identical individuations or simple recurrences. Rather, the relationality of these individuations lies in their common potential, as cues that an analogous process of ontogenesis is taking place. Whether taking form in Twin Peaks or elsewhere, each Lynchian individuation resounds with the ​ ​ “potential for a vast, infinite experience” that can “keep happening” (Lynch qtd. in del Río 178). As shown here, the propagation of the secret­danger dyad across narratives and across films is one such case of this continuous Lynchian happening.

3.4 Becoming Secret, Becoming Lynch: Club Silencio as Theatre of Individuation Of these happenings, the most prominent may be the reemergence of the red curtains in Mulholland Drive. In Twin Peaks, the secret becoming of Cooper/BOB only takes form in the ​ ​ ​ final seconds of Season Two. The danger inherent to this individuation is tangible, yet largely left open to speculation: we can only imagine how the narrative will continue to unfold from here, and how that secret will (in this case literally) continue to feed on the broader environment of danger that both individuates and sustains it. In contrast, the return of the red curtains in Mulholland Drive’s Club Silencio marks an evolution of the secret­danger dyad within Lynch’s ​ overall process of narrative individuation. No longer relegated to beyond what we can see, Mulholland Drive places a sustained focus on the becoming of secrets and their dangerous ​ milieux in action. Significantly, this narrative process is not one of discovering, unveiling, or resolving a secret; rather, as the film follows the contorted individuations of Club Silencio, what lies beyond the veil (or curtains) are only more secrets—fluctuations in a process of secrecy. “Silencio. Silencio. Silencio. No hay banda. No hay orquesta.” Rita whispers while ​ ​ clutching the bed sheets, her eyes fixed in an unblinking stare. Betty wakes up next to her with a start. “Rita? Rita, wake up.” “Go with me somewhere,” Rita urges. The cryptic yet loaded dialogue builds on a rash of secrets and mounting dread that has been simmering since the onset Yudelman 37

of Mulholland Drive: who is Rita? Where was she going that night on Mulholland Drive? What ​ ​ is her involvement in the endless chain of conspiratorial phone calls that follow her throughout the film? Despite the late hour, Rita is eerily insistent that they go. Betty obliges, and the two set out deep into the Los Angeles night, armed with their blond wigs. The camera mirrors Rita’s pull, rushing frantically towards Club Silencio by way of fast tracking shot (fig. 8). The two women enter a spectacular auditorium. As they fumble to find seats, a booming voice surrounds them, echoing the same words Rita uttered only moments before, this time robust with vibrato. The camera cuts to the source, and there they are: a frame full of thick red velvet, dangling from floor to ceiling around the perimeter of the stage.

Fig. 8. Betty and Rita enter Club Silencio in Mulholland Drive ​

“It is all an illusion,” the maestro tells us, “no hay banda, and yet we hear a band.” He ​ ​ points his baton dramatically, as a clarinet, trombone, and then trumpet each invisibly sound their responses, as if the music were emanating from thin air. Betty and Rita grasp each other’s wrists, growing increasingly concerned with each reaction shot. The curtains part, and a trumpetist dressed in white steps out onto the stage. The musician abruptly stops playing, but the melody continues to echo throughout the club, confirming the maestro’s premonition that it is Yudelman 38

indeed all a tape recording. “Listen!” He raises his arms theatrically. The music becomes a thunderstorm, and blue lights begin to flash. Betty shakes violently in her seat, thrashing uncontrollably. The storm dies down, introducing the next act: La Llorona de Los Angeles, Rebekah Del Rio. As La Llorona belts out a harrowing acapella version of “Llorando,” Betty and Rita begin to cry. The camera closes in, cutting from their tears to the painted one on La Llorona’s cheek. She collapses suddenly but again the music continues, indifferent to the singer who is now being dragged off stage. Betty and Rita sob; their chests heave with the affective weight of the scene. As Badalamenti’s strings overtake the song, Betty slowly reaches into her purse and pulls out a mysterious blue box. Through their tears, Betty and Rita gaze at each other. They know what they must do. For the remainder of the film, Betty and Rita’s world is turned upside down: Betty becomes Diane and Rita becomes Camilla; it is unclear whether we have entered the future, a dream, or an alternate reality. As the locus of this transformation, we can look to how Club Silencio, complete with its red curtains, literalizes a Lynchian theatre of individuation. Numerous shocks to the system interlace the tense reactions between audience and performer, continuously generating something new, whether a cloud of smoke, a thunderstorm, or a new interpretation of the events taking place. Significantly, the individuating narrative action of Club Silencio concerns formal elements as much as plot. Every break in tension also signals an onslaught of new potential: the infinite possibilities when sound and image no longer sync. When the shot­reaction­shot sequence gives way to creeping close ups, tensions escalate; when image breaks from sound, new meanings are made. It is this intense interaction that gives rise to the scene, and vice versa; sound and image become dangerous narrative development. As Betty and Rita are drawn deeper into the action, Club Silencio unfurls as a cluster of secrets—a cinematic constellation that is unknown, but also not meant to be known. Collectively ​ these secrets draw from an amorphous environment of danger. This time, however, the danger is not only that harm may arise; it is that anything could happen. It is the danger of affective ​ ​ ambiguity: that the film will not make sense, yet we will continue to be moved by it, like Betty and Rita watching the limp La Llorona being dragged through the red curtains while her voice continues to swell (fig. 9). The theatre of individuation itself takes on new form, polarized by the Yudelman 39

magnetism of Lynch’s cinematic spectacle. Every line, character, sound, object, and shot comes alive with secrecy, constructing a Lynchian environment that interrelates narrative, aesthetic, and sonic planes. Nothing and no one can be separated within the alarming individuation of Club Silencio.

Fig. 9. La Llorona collapsed on stage in Mulholland Drive ​

Thus, this scene both actualizes and amplifies the Simondonian principle that “the individuated being is not substance, but a being put in question, a being that, by means of a problematic, is divided, reunited, carried within this problematic that arises through him and makes him become as he does become” (Simondon qtd. in Alloa 357). Here, it is not only Rita’s identity that is put in question; it is the very fabric of reality. When the live trumpet becomes tape recording, when La Llorona collapses mid­song, when Betty convulses uncontrollably, when the entire plot is turned on its head in the aftermath, it is more than just the narrative that is problematized; the being of Mulholland Drive itself is put in question, and through this process, ​ ​ it becomes—it becomes Lynch. ​

Yudelman 40

3.5 The Genesis of Secrecy Over the course of Lynch’s work, this process of secrecy takes on new narrative forms, mutating into something different than it was at the start. In The Grandmother, one of Lynch’s ​ ​ first films, a little boy grows his own grandmother from a pot of dirt and keeps her squirrelled away in the attic, unbeknownst to his parents. As his secret festers, another seed is planted: the germ that sets a continuous process of secrecy in motion, an ongoing Lynchian individuation that will span the following four decades and counting. By the mid 1980s and early 1990s, this process has (d)evolved. No longer tethered to a protagonist, secret individuations have begun to infect the overall plot structure in strange new ways. As shown here, the individuation of Cooper/BOB in the final episode of Twin Peaks constitutes a secret becoming that abounds with ​ ​ danger—the potential for more secrets, and more danger within the environment of Twin Peaks, ​ ​ even beyond where we can see. The endings of Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart, on the other hand, ​ ​ ​ ​ produce a supersaturated secrecy on a meta­cinematic level. When Sandy and Jeffrey coo to a robin on their windowsill, or when The Good Witch appears before Sailor in a pink bubble, the nauseating sweetness is almost unbearable after the horror that precedes it. In both cases the anti­denouement undermines the entire narrative and destroys any sense of a coherent film world. Particularly in the case of Wild at Heart, reviews responded to the meta­narrative violence ​ ​ with a brutality of their own—one particularly incensed reviewer referred to the ending of Wild ​ at Heart as a weakness that relapses into “black jokeness as if to tell us that we needn't, after all, ​ ​ treat it seriously,” (Malcom) as if Lynch himself were keeping something from us. Yet the ​ bizarre endings of Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart produce another, more generative kind of ​ ​ ​ ​ violence as well: by toppling the Hollywood trope of the happy ending, these films show that such genre conventions were never stable to begin with. By Inland Empire, Lynch’s most recent ​ ​ film, the entire narrative reverberates with obscurity. The characters, settings, perspective, and overall plot structure are all secret, generating an amorphous environment of danger that ​ threatens to swallow the film whole. As this process of secrecy individuates across films, it takes on new depth, like a crystal infinitely expanding in its metastable solution. It is important to note that Lynch films, like strange, shimmering crystals, do not merely open up new spaces for secrecy to breed; rather, they Yudelman 41

tap into a larger cinematic environment that was already brimming with the potential for secrets, danger, violence, and other dark becomings. This broader Lynchian milieu testifies to its own processual nature, the perpetual metastability of that which is “not yet” individuated. Each phase in this twisting process affirms how, like the films themselves, secrets cannot really be broken down into concrete narrative elements such as people, places, or things. Secrets are all of these individuations and more. More accurately, secrets are the process that individuates and interrelates these entities. Simondon writes that we cannot “speak of an individual, but only of individuation; one must go back to the activity, the genesis, instead of trying to apprehend the being as entirely made… the individual is not a being, but an act” (qtd. in Barthélémy 213). In Lynch, secrets are an act; a movement within a genesis of secrecy. This secret­genesis has substantial implications for conceptualizing filmic narratives on the whole. By looking to Lynch’s films as a series of narrative processes, we encounter a broader cinematic environment that is not stable or unstable, but metastable. Such narrative metastability ​ ​ means that Lynch films, in addition to sustaining various individuations, are themselves perpetually individuating—they are continuing stories that refuse to come to an end. By virtue of ​ ​ this continuous, shadowy becoming, Lynch narratives generate a different type of individuation as well: they open up new possibilities for theorizing the narrative space of cinema. When Cooper/BOB smashes his head against the mirror in Twin Peaks, or Club Silencio erupts in a ​ ​ cloud of blue smoke in Mulholland Drive, or the rabbits’ phone collapses realities in Inland ​ ​ ​ Empire, the effect is not “the realization of a coherent and positioned space” through ​ “positioning, cohering, binding in,” (Heath 385) as Stephen Heath once theorized. On the contrary, Lynch’s dizzying cinema expresses a continuously individuating environment through subverting, shattering, and bursting open what a narrative can do. Never a means to an end; always an opening to a gateway. Yudelman 42

4. Environments of the Surface: Textures and Texturologies

“I don’t necessarily love rotting bodies, but there’s a texture to a rotting body that is unbelievable. Have you ever seen a little rotted animal? I love looking at those things, just as much as I like to look at a close­up of some tree bark, or a small bug, or a cup of coffee, or a piece of pie. You get in close and the textures are wonderful.” (Lynch, Catching 121) ​ ​ ​

4.1 Constructing an Architexture of Lynch’s Cinema Amidst the shiny veneer of deep blue sky and white picket fences, an insidious scene burrows deep within Blue Velvet. Jeffrey Beaumont’s father is lying on his front lawn, his face ​ ​ contorted in pain. He is having a stroke. The water from his garden hose nevertheless sprays generously, attracting a nearby baby and a thirsty dog. The camera momentarily revels in the sinister humour of the dog poised on the collapsed Mr. Beaumont’s crotch, eagerly lapping up the shooting stream of water. We cut to a close up: a fine mist lightly grazes the grass in slow motion. As the camera creeps forward into the ground, each green blade rustles out of focus, brushing gently over the lens as if both seducing us inward and pushing us away. Still the camera closes in. Beneath the tickle of the cool grass (fig. 10), a disturbing texture surfaces: thousands of insects swarm the frame, chomping vigorously. We enter a swath of brittle bodies, sharp pincers, and hairy legs, each clamboring over the others with abandon. The screen becomes a tumultuous sea of dark matter, furiously weaving and reweaving itself. The noise is unbearable.

Fig. 10. Grass in the opening of Blue Velvet ​ Yudelman 43

As seen in this opening sequence of Blue Velvet, Lynch films abound with texture. More ​ ​ precisely, in Lynch, textures form charged cinematic environments of their own. From the cosmic dust of Eraserhead’s glimmering black and white vistas to the moist gluckiness of the ​ ​ creamed corn in Fire Walk with Me, Lynchian textures boil, sizzle, ooze and wheeze with an ​ ​ affective metastability that keeps on affecting. As enveloping residues teeming with potential, textures function as dynamic sites of individuation that often overflow the narrative, propagating instead on the surface of the films. Thus, where the previous chapter looked to the ontogenesis of secrecy within a larger narrative environment, in this chapter I take a more sensory­aesthetic ​ perspective on Lynch, focusing on the individuation of texture in surface environments. I argue ​ ​ that, as a different kind of cinematic milieu, Lynchian surfaces warrant their own critical discussion. At the same time, I maintain that Lynch’s surfaces and narratives are still inherently interrelated in what they produce: the Lynchian process of textural individuation, like secrecy, creates metastable milieux of continuous becoming. Alongside Lynch, I continue to engage the philosophical texture of Simondon’s work, conducting another type of surface reading. Particularly in his writings on physical individuation, I argue that Simondon expresses a latent fascination with the texture of physical structures as they come into being. Beginning with a brief discussion of how texture can be conceptualized in Simondon as a generative threshold or point of contact between individual and milieu, I relate his notes on physical individuation to his insights on the constructive activity of images. From there, I foray into the cinematic implications of this notion, with Lynch’s dazzling filmic textures as my guide. In doing so, I attempt another step toward bridging the gap between a Simondonian methodology and the groundwork already laid by contemporary film studies. Specifically, I draw on the discipline’s recent turn towards texture and haptics by way of Giuliana Bruno—with recourse to Laura Marks and Gilles Deleuze—in order to further flesh out the cinematic potential in Simondon’s work. The bulk of this chapter is then spent theorizing the becoming of Lynchian textures that span from the supple velvet of Blue Velvet to the repulsive blistering of Dune, with ​ ​ ​ other stops along the way. While each textural becoming generates a sensory metastability in its ​ ​ own way, I show that all express a dynamic Lynchian relationality—one that re­negotiates the Yudelman 44

affective landscape of the surface. Ultimately, by extending, interlacing, and enfolding such Lynchian textures with the philosophical textures of individuation, this chapter takes a deeper look into how “matter has what Simondon understands as plasticity, the capacity to become something other than what it is now, as its positivity, its openness, its orientation to transformation” (Grosz 45), and how that material plasticity manifests in the surface texture of Lynch films. Moreover, I use Lynch’s work to develop a conception of texture beyond its seedlings in Simondon and film studies. Throughout the chapter I consider how, just as texture transverses the surface environment of Lynch’s cinema, it also exceeds the confines of any one sense­modality. Put differently, I explore how texture is not limited to the realm of images. Building on Bruno’s call for a theoretical turn which “insists that the object of visual studies goes well beyond the image,” (3) I consider what such a plastic, multi­modal texturology might look like. Laura Marks makes a similar gesture, by connecting haptics more broadly to “the experience of a sound, a color, a gesture, of the feelings of arousal, anxiety, nausea, or bereavement that they provoke” (ix). With regard to Lynch, we can begin to further develop this project by analyzing how sound is inherently connected to image, creating a multi­sensorial texture that flows through and beyond both elements. As Chion reminds us, “to enter into and animate a surface, there is nothing like sound. It is sound which provides the third dimension, of whatever kind. Nevertheless, even when animated by sound, the surface is always there, questioning and presiding through its texture” (Chion 195). For this reason, I pay particular attention to the affective textures that emerge when sound “marries” picture—that Lynchian texturality that “you can feel” when they marry and “the thing jumps” (Lynch, Catching 43, ​ ​ ​ ​ italics in original). Thus, whereas haptic criticism mimetically “presses up to the object and takes its shape” (Marks viii), I engage in a Lynchian texturology that presses through the films and ​ ​ transforms their shape, while being transformed itself by that process. In doing so, I hope to take ​ another stride towards individuating an ontogenic cinema—one that feels as much as thinks. ​ ​

4.2 From Coral to Cinema: Texture in/as Individuation To take a step back, however, it is first worth considering how Simondon’s theory of individuation harbours a latent yet illuminating insight into texture. In particular, his discussion Yudelman 45

of what could be termed the surface activity or perpetual ex­centrism of the crystal provides a useful entry point for theorizing how texture functions processually, as a becoming of the surface. Already in his very description of crystallization, Simondon displays a significant preoccupation with the surface of the crystal as it takes form. In L'individuation à la lumière des ​ notions de forme et d'information7, Simondon emphasizes the activity at the boundary of the ​ crystal in formation (“Genesis,” 304); it is precisely the surface of the crystal where individuation is played out, in the very texture of the emerging physical structure. He writes that the structure is brought to completion as “a result of the activity that takes place and the modulation that occurs at the frontier between interior domain and the exterior… the physical individual [is] perpetually ex­centric; perpetually peripheral in relation to itself, active at the limit of its own terrain” (“Genesis” 305). Through this perspective, the propagation of the crystal within its metastable milieu can be regarded as the individuation of surface layer upon surface layer, in which “each layer serves as germ for the following layer” (Alloa 362). Crystalline texture, then, is not merely a stable physical quality or consistency, but a point of contact between the individual and its milieu, between interior and exterior; it is the very activity of physical individuation taking form. We see this elsewhere in Simondon’s writings as well. In his example of brick making, for instance, ontogenesis is embedded in the very principle of the brick’s texture as it comes into being: between the clay, which is “extracted from marshy soil, ‘dried out, ground into powder, immersed in water, kneaded for a long time’” (Simondon qtd. in Chabot 76) and the mould, “made from wood that is relatively robust, but still malleable” (Chabot 76), the resulting texture of the brick is this precise meeting of clay and mould, matter and form; a new texture realized by a release of energy through combustion. Likewise, there is something particularly resonant about Simondon’s interest in the coral colony, lichen, or jellyfish. As with the crystal or brick, the very organization of these physical structures takes form through their specific texture. In the case of the coral colony, its rough

7 Here I refer to Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter’s translation of the introduction to ILFI. Yudelman 46

porousness is the active threshold between the being and its environment, and between the individual and the colony. Simondon describes how continual formations can appear between individuals, constituting a solid material unity of the colony… This limestone deposit, compact or spongy, loses within the polyp its ‘rower’ form [sa forme rameuse] and gives it a massiveness; the individuals do not ​ ​ appear more than their open chalices at the communal surface level of the colony (L’individuation à la lumière 168). ​ ​ We see an implicit opening into the possibilities of textural individuation, and an added ​ ​ dimension to Simondon’s view that matter is “multiformed, for it has the potential or virtuality, the capacity, to take on a number of forms” (Grosz 45). Through this perspective, texture is not inert, but itself an active process of becoming. In turning to the textural cinema of Lynch, these reflections continue to gain ground. How Simondon might have understood the texture of cinema is of course open to interpretation, as it remains a topic not explicitly discussed in his work. Still, it bears mention that Simondon identifies a structural principle in the image, stating that “in the image there is an activity of construction that makes it not a simple prolonging of perception” (qtd. in Alloa 368). This constructive motion of the image concerns “how [the image] brings together heterogeneous contents, how it extracts from these contents orientations, and how these orientations can be materially realized” (Chabot 101). Although Simondon primarily focuses on the perceptual and cognitive aspects of this process,8 his hypothesis of “an image whose dynamism is at once generative and cyclical...in all orders of reality” (Chabot 101) invites new interpretations of how we might understand the image’s ‘orientations’ with respect to cinema. Simondon posits that “the genesis of the image is rooted in the corporeality of the individual” (Chabot 103); in its life cycle, the image becomes charged with affect, and remains capable of evolving (Chabot 102). Here, we encounter a certain autonomy of the image within Simondon’s framework. As an “intermediate between object and subject”(Chabot 101), the image emerges as a “‘quasi­organism,’ itself taken in a cycle of becoming” (Alloa 369). Despite such relative autonomy, however, the genesis of the image remains indeterminate. Its ongoing

8 See page 102 of Chabot’s book for a good summary of the perceptive cycle of the image, as discussed by Simondon in his 1965­1966 Sorbonne course. Yudelman 47

plasticity or virtuality speaks to what Simondon deems a fundamental function of visualization: “the capacity to anticipate something that is not yet the case” (Alloa 367). In this light, the ‘orientations’ of the cinematic image—how its ensemble of heterogeneous contents become materially realized—speaks to the virtual potentials embedded in the image itself. We might imagine these many possible orientations as a piece of velvet held up under a spotlight: as shimmering patterns of dark and light, soft and coarse, opaque and translucent absorb and refract each other, the fabric becomes a moving relation that both materializes form and anticipates new form. Likewise, as Lynch’s films consistently reminds us, the cinematic image contains endless potential to move, affect, and transform. Texture, then, is one way that the image’s orientations can become materially realized both on­ and off­screen. Moreover, when we consider the textures of sound and image together, even more orientations open up. Chion has poetically observed how recurring Lynchian textures such as “smoke, velvet, water, fire and snow are animated by undulating, shimmering, shivering, flashing and tentacular movements which largely overflow the visual field” (Chion 196, italics ​ ​ added). Spilling over with sensory excesses, this highly textural cinema proves to be deeply affective time and again, making us move with the films in strange Lynchian ways. When the camera moves sinisterly through the dark grass of Blue Velvet, I feel shivers up my spine; when ​ ​ the sea of frenzied insects swallows up the screen, I sink down into the seat, my shoulders tense; when the scene finally cuts, I find myself scrambling for air, as if breathing for the first time. As recent developments in film studies have shown, such textural activity has everything to do with the affective potential of the surface. The work of Giuliana Bruno is particularly relevant here, as her development of a Deleuzian “texturology” (4) approaches a Simondonian framework. Specifically, Bruno explores “the manifold senses in which surface becomes an extensive form of textural contact: a transmission that connects different elements, a membrane that tangibly transforms the fabrication of inner and outer space” (Bruno 13). The literal membranes of the jellyfish and the coral colony come to mind, as well as the textural surface activity of the crystal. Besides these basic affinities, however, Bruno’s insights help concretize and extend Simondon’s claims about the constructive activity of the image and its orientations. In considering the visual text as fundamentally textural (5), Bruno shows how film surface Yudelman 48

transforms the inner and outer space of the cinematic image in multiple ways. This transformative spatiality goes beyond matters of simple perception. While the texture of an image can of course generate an intimate closeness or a vast depth onto a flat surface, it also reconfigures the very landscape of that surface, and the ever enfolding inner and outer spaces of affect itself. As Bruno writes, the affect is here itself a landscape of the surface and a space that, being itself textured, can become manifested texturally. Affect is also exposed as a pliant, porous medium of superficial material communication. It is an extensive form of transmission that not only takes place on the surface but also communicates in and across different spaces. It is in this sense that one can say that it is not only a medium but it is “intermediated.” (Bruno 18) To return to Simondon, we can reiterate that the constructive activity of the image is not simply a prolonging of perception; it is a genesis of affective transformation, always active at the limits of its own terrain. Moreover, in Lynch, such generative activity perpetually re­constructs the very terrain of affect itself, carving out new sense­modalities that are not limited to vision. A Lynchian texturology should therefore account for the myriad ways that sound and image spill over the domain of sight and into the textural synesthesia of a vastly connected environment. There, “as affects and sensations constantly unfold...they reciprocally shape [that] ever changing environment” (Bruno 20). Moreover, as textural activity, these cinematic processes point to the ​ ​ ways that “the surface is here an environment” (Bruno 8, italics added). ​ ​

4.3 “Feel me”: Becoming Velvet in Blue Velvet ​ Blue Velvet offers some compelling cases for working through these ideas. As the title ​ suggests, velvet recurs frequently throughout the film: the lush backdrop of the opening credits; the dress Dorothy Vallens wears on stage9 and the song she sings; the piles of fabric that Frank shoves into her mouth. More interesting, however, is the way these instances build up to the

9 Significantly, The Slow Room, with its “live” band and red curtains, appears as an uncanny incarnation of what later becomes Club Silencio in Mulholland Drive. Yet whereas in the previous chapter I considered the cinematic ​ ​ metastability of Club Silencio in narrative­centric terms, here I look more intently at how that metastability surfaces ​ in the texture of Blue Velvet. ​ Yudelman 49

surface of the film itself becoming velvet, creating an affective metastability that erupts precisely ​ ​ through this process of textural genesis.

Fig. 11. Isabella Rossellini as Dorothy Vallens in Blue Velvet ​

The moment in which Jeffrey Beaumont and Dorothy Vallens first embrace is one such instance. In the setting of her dimly lit apartment, Dorothy lies distraught on the couch, while the half naked Jeffrey meekly tries to comfort her. Frank has just raped her, then taken off. “Hold me, hold me! I’m scared. I’m scared. I’m scared.” Dorothy whispers over and over, wrapping herself around Jeffrey’s body. They rock back and forth, as Dorothy kneads her hands into Jeffrey’s shoulders, her face pressed against his neck. Their contoured limbs are cloaked in Dorothy’s velvet sleeve, much of the frame obscured by her feathery brown wig. As Dorothy slides her cheek over Jeffrey’s skin, hanging upside down in his arms, the camera tilts down with her, swaying slightly with each haptic breath: “Do you like the way I feel?” She purrs with her eyes closed. The camera closes in on Dorothy’s upturned cheek, as her eyes, lips, nostrils, and chin become smooth folds in her supple skin; no longer recognizable facial features, they are saturated smears of light amid the soft film grain (fig. 11). “Feel me.” The sound of her saliva is tenebrous and thick against the airiness of her voice. The camera lingers on this velvety moment, enduring it for what feels like eternity. Yudelman 50

Here we encounter the pure potentialities of what Deleuze refers to as the affection­image; the affect of this powerful close up is expressed “outside of place­time ​ coordinates, as singularity in its uniqueness and in its virtual relations” (Deleuze qtd. in ​ ​ Akervall, italics in original). Following Deleuze’s conception of affect as that which is felt rather than understood (Akervall), I would argue that here, velvet is itself an affective flow. As the ​ ​ entrancing spell of Isabella Rosselini unfolds before us, it becomes a force that we feel rather than comprehend. The velvety texture that endures from this close up—the pure potentiality of becoming velvet—moves us in a way that a simple shot of actualized velvet cannot. ​ To use Simondonian terms, we might describe this affection­image as a surface milieu that is metastable with affective potential. From this perspective, the scene’s becoming velvet happens at the threshold of this surface environment; its texture is that activity which operates at the very boundary of the supersaturated scene, where sound and image collide as haptics. The affect that gives way from this textural metastability generates an enfolding of inner and outer screen space. We are haptically put in touch with the velvet becoming and it touches us back: “as it links inside and outside, the texture of the fold reveals an affective enfolding. In the architecture of sensing, reciprocal and reversible, we become connected” (Bruno 19). Put differently, within the affective enfolding of this scene, velvet becomes “pure intensity unencumbered by narrative… transmuted instead into a power of cinematic self­affection” (del Río 17). Velvet Lynches—on the surface of the film, and beyond. ​ ​

4.4 The Skin of the Film: Towards a Dermal Texturology of Lynch Other textural becomings surface differently, affecting us in a multitude of Lynchian ways. Besides the haptic “smooth space” of Blue Velvet’s becoming velvet, other Lynch films ​ ​ show that rough, soggy, or sticky textures also emerge as cinematic spaces that “must be moved through by constant reference to the immediate environment, as when navigating an expanse of snow or sand” (Marks xii). In doing so, texture emerges as a form of grotesque environmental contact in itself—one that gushes with affects considerably less soft than velvet, but no less potent. Yudelman 51

As Bruno writes, “many changes affected by the migration of images happen on the ​ surface and manifest themselves texturally as a kind of surface tension, which affects the very ‘skin’ of images and the space of their circulation” (3). Many Lynch films build on this claim, expressing how the synesthetic texture of skin itself becomes an affective tension of the surface. In Eraserhead, the porous acne scars of the Man in the Planet haptically reverberates within an ​ ​ entire constellation of Lynchian texture: the rubbery tips of the rough pencil erasers; the cratered surface of his lone planet; the rocky, swollen cheeks of the Lady in the Radiator; and not least of all the scratches of the aged 35 millimeter film. All bleed together into the rumbling textural environment of Eraserhead, unleashing strange sensations that weave through the screen as ​ ​ ​ coarsely as they weave together on screen. ​ ​

Fig. 12. John Hurt in The Elephant Man ​

In Lynch’s second feature film, The Elephant Man, dermal textures take on new form ​ ​ within a new surface environment. Affect itself breeds in the folds of John Merrick’s skin, Yudelman 52

through which John Hurt’s powerfully emotive performance surfaces. As he smiles, cries, breathes, and communicates through the dense folds of facial tissue, indescribable feelings of torment, sympathy, and grief arise lucidly in the high contrast sheen of the film stock (fig. 12). The face becomes a literal and figural “dermal surface of design,” enabling “a more textured configuration of affective landscapes... extend[ing] their material manifestation onto a larger screen,” (Bruno 14) and indeed beyond the screen. Lynch explores the affective potential of dermal textures vis à vis their filmic milieux in ‐ ‐ other ways throughout his career. The soft wrinkles of the many elderly characters in Twin Peaks ​ often constitutes a break in narrative action, affectively materializing the slow passing of time as sustained through painfully long takes10. Other examples include how the protagonist’s visibly failing body in The Straight Story transforms the film’s rural environment to a cinematic ​ ​ landscape of wistful mourning, in which elaborate crane shots become morose and isolating. Even the garish make­up caked on Laura Dern’s mother in Wild at Heart individuates a disgust ​ ​ that is penetratingly corporeal in reach. Time and again we see that “affects not only are makers of space but are themselves configured as space, and they have the actual texture of atmosphere” (Bruno 19).

Fig. 13. Baron Harkonnen in Dune ​ Nowhere is this more pronounced than the atmospheric texture­relations of Baron

10 Poignant examples include the elderly butler at the Great Northern Hotel, Mrs. Tremond from Laura’s Meals on Wheels route, and the wobbly bank teller Audrey Horne encounters in the series finale. Yudelman 53

Harkonnen’s diseased skin in Dune. On the muggy planet of Giedi Prime, the perspiring villain ​ ​ lays propped in a dental chair as his minions fawn over his squelching dermal tissue. “You are so beautiful, my Baron. Your skin: love to me. Your diseases, cared for for all eternity...” the doctor tells Harkonnen, as he wriggles a needle around in his bulbous cheek (fig. 13). In close up Harkonnen smiles vacantly. Yet while his eyes belie a lack of activity, his dermis stirs with repulsive movement: his blue­green facial warts squirt and ooze liberally, the sound echoing haptically throughout his chamber, as though a giant slug were being squashed over and over. Arguably the star of the entire textural saga that is Dune, Harkonnen’s skin cinematically ​ ​ realizes the notion of texture as productive at the limits of its own terrain, an active point of contact between the individual and its surrounding environment. A dermal surface that is literally alive, the textural “disease” of Harkonnen’s facial tissue acts as more than just a simple membrane between being and environment. Rather, this slimy membrane constitutes an transformative enfolding of inner and outer space.

Fig. 14. Harkonnen’s atmospheric dermal relations in Dune ​

On a basic level, Harkonnen’s skin envelops and rearranges the aesthetic architexture of Dune: against the garish turquoise of the Baron’s blistering face, the hair of his nephews glows ​ especially orange, and the walls of the chamber turn an unsettling shade of smooth, putrid green. Upon closer consideration, however, it becomes apparent that the permeable lesions of Yudelman 54

Harkonnen’s skin reflect a deeper permeability in the surrounding filmic milieu. When the Baron floats upward toward the ceiling, cackling, this motion triggers a dermal thunderstorm that extends to all areas of the cinematic space: a clap of thunder and pounding organ music accompanies the camera zooming toward Harkonnen; his swollen pustules burst into a flowing stream of opaque purple rain that pours torrentially over the scene (fig. 14). In drawing on Bruno, we can look to how the texturality of Harkonnen’s skin affectively transforms the very skin of the film surface, emanating a moist, stinky disgust that penetrates through the frame. The texture of the scene itself, the very “skin” of Dune, blisters with an affective repugnance that is ​ ​ classically Lynchian, here cinematically realized as dermal. In this sense, texture acts as a threshold that cannot be broken down into individual and milieu, or interior and exterior. Rather, as an affective process, it enables the surface to come “into play as a partition that ‘mediates’ by acting as a material configuration of how the visible meets the thinkable” (Bruno 13), or, we could add, how the textural meets the sensible. Furthermore, as “a connective, pervasive, or enveloping substance [and] an intertwining matter through which impressions are conveyed to the senses,” the textural medium “is a living environment of expression” (Bruno 5). Texture is both the surface environment and the affect that individuates from it. As seen especially in Dune, texture bubbles as surface, but also ​ permeates through that surface, effectively creating its own dermal environment, as well as the ​ ​ affective individuation that breeds within it.

4.5 The Textural Relations of Lynch Here, we see a return to the generative violence that weaves throughout Lynch’s narrative environments. In this case, however, that (re)generation is played out as an affective process. As Harkonnen’s skin lesions sputter and spew, aggressively boiling to the surface of the film and beyond, this textural becoming produces a series of material reactions that individuate through an affective landscape. Bruno reminds us that “there is no stasis in this affective landscape, even when nothing seems to move” (28). It never stops becoming; old textural forms continually make way for new ones. As the images and sounds appear and disappear before us, we are enfolded in Yudelman 55

a destructive process that is also inherently creative, producing strange Lynchian sensations that we often feel rather than comprehend. On a meta­cinematic level, Lynch films continually push this creative/destructive potential into new spaces. As the films reach an affective metastability that enfolds us and transforms our experience, they also re­imagine the (im)material possibilities of texture. Here, I explored the becoming velvet of Blue Velvet and the dermal rhythms of Dune as two ​ ​ ​ ​ introductory cases of Lynchian textures that haptically embrace us. Yet we can also consider where other textures might take us, and the potential texturologies that have yet to unfold. How might Lynch’s turn to digital cinematography de­stabilize our ideas of haptic experience, for instance? What about those instances when sound seems to overtake image altogether, and “an abstract cosmic murmur can be heard... always in a precise register which is Lynch's own, evoking intimacy, the world's voice speaking in our ear” (Chion 52)? The possibilities for touching and re­dressing texturality are manifold. Lynch’s work also shows how the Simondononian theory of individuation harbours its own plasticity and orientation to transformation. In expanding Simondon’s hypothesis that the source of ontogenesis can be derived from the relations of matter and form (“Genesis” 298), a new mode of ‘superficial’ thinking opens up, spanning the surfaces of Lynch’s cinema as well as the philosophical textures of individuation more generally. Here, the surface becomes a threshold, but one that goes beyond divisions of interior and exterior. As a moving milieu of textural genesis, the surface is an environment in a Simondonian sense: perpetually unfolding and enfolding itself, and always active at the limits of its own terrain. Like the “pure individual” that detaches itself from the coral colony, the dynamic texturality of Lynch films inserts itself between two points without ever being integrated into either; “its beginning and end are in equilibrium, in that it comes from one community but engenders another; it is (a) relation’” ​ ​ (Simondon qtd. in Chabot 93, italics in original). In Lynch’s cinema, we can explore that relationality as texture: between sound and image, ideas and affects, being and becoming, texture transpires as Lynchian relation. In attempting such exploration, these discussions continue to take on new form, generating a dynamic theoretical space where Lynch, Simondon, and contemporary film theory Yudelman 56

can actively transform each other. It is this space which I have begun to shape and stretch here, as an invitation for others to continue exploring its many tensions and orientations. Here we can imagine Lynch’s cinema as an endless expanse of swimming fabric. Perhaps it is velvety, wrinkled, or porous, or maybe it is a texture that we have never encountered before, like the digital silk that Laura Dern burns her cigarette through in Inland Empire. As Harry Dean Stanton ​ ​ tells Dern, “there is a vast network, right. An ocean of possibilities.” And in that ocean, there is no telling how deep we can go.

Yudelman 57

5. Coda: Environments of Thought

“An idea is a thought. It’s a thought that holds more than you think it does when you receive it. But in that first moment there is a spark.” (Lynch, Catching 23) ​ ​

Over the last four chapters, I explored some of the different ways Lynch films create cinematic environments, and what those environments can do. In moving through this multi­layered expanse, I encountered several metastable milieux that are rife with potential for Lynchian becomings. Filmic elements that span sound and image, danger and secrets, textures and affects were reformulated within larger processes of narrative and surface, as well as the overarching genesis of Lynch’s oeuvre. At the same time, I considered the cinematic possibilities of Gilbert Simondon’s theory of individuation. Drawing from specific notions such as relationality, metastability, genesis, crystallization, and invention, I fashioned an evolving theoretical space within which Lynch and Simondon mutually transform each other. A generative tension bubbles up here—one with the potential to individuate new sparks, new forms, and new ideas. In considering these intertwining movements together, another type of metastable environment emerges: an environment of thought. Emanating from the inherent relationality of author and text, individual and environment, and film and spectator, this Lynchian environment encompasses the films but also builds on them and thinks through them, unleashing a different sort of potential that rumbles within. In this sense, the cinema of Lynch is itself a germ. Within the process of individuation, Chabot notes the relevance of the germ as a sort of “blind spot”, elaborating that it does not seem possible to give an ‘explanation’ for [its] appearance, since the germ might be a speck of dust, or any other physical entity, as long it as has an effect on the meta­stable milieu. This remark by Simondon reveals that the origin of the germ is a blind spot within his doctrine. The germ is envisaged here as a piece of information… the problem is not to find out the origin of the germ, but to discover the conditions under which it will be able to have an effect. (83­84) Yudelman 58

Likewise, the point is not to unveil the origin or explanation of Lynch films, but to look at their effects within a broader context. As Lynch frequently reiterates: “it’s better not to know so much about what things mean or how they might be interpreted or you’ll be too afraid to let things keep happening” (qtd. in del Río 178). Part of the extraordinary power of Lynch films is that they do keep happening—as a continuing story of cinematic environments, but also in response ​ ​ to the continuing story of contemporary film theory. In the humanities’ increasing obsession with data, we have started looking farther and farther away from art. Somewhere along the way, we seem to have forgotten the powerful potential of cinema to redistribute the sensible. As this academic milieu reaches its own metastability, its own tipping point, Lynch films show us something that was already there, but that we could not see. By creating environments that abound with the wild, cinematic potential of continuous becoming, Lynch’s cinema perpetually takes on new form, while giving new form to cinema at large. In the broader milieu of filmic thinking I have begun to tap into here, Lynch enables new ideas to individuate. As Simondon shows, the germ introduces change into its surrounding environment, but cannot exhaust its potential. The same is true of Lynch. As germ, we can look to how the Lynch filmography instigates an environment of thinking that is “at once pre­individual, individuating, and individuated; it becomes something, something emerges or erupts, but it leaves in its context or milieu a residue or excess that is the condition for future becomings” (Grosz 38). In working with this theoretical excess, I brought Lynch and Simondon together as a means of germinating my own thought environment. There, we find the seed of an ontogenic cinema that has only just begun to become—become Lynch. ​ ​ Yudelman 59

Works Cited Åkervall, Lisa. “Cinema, Affect and Vision.” Rhizomes 16 (Summer 2008): n. pag. ​ ​ Alloa, Emmanuel. “Prégnances du devenir: Simondon et les images.” Critique 5.516 (2015): ​ ​ 356­371. Andrew, Dudley. “The Unauthorized Auteur Today” Film and Theory: An Anthology. Eds. ​ ​ Robert Stam and Toby Miller. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2000. 20­29. Barthélémy, Jean­Hugues. “Glossary: Fifty Key Terms in the Works of Gilbert Simondon.” Trans. Arne de Boever. Gilbert Simondon: Being and Technology. Eds. Arne De Boever, ​ ​ Alex Murray, Jon Roffe and Ashley Woodward. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012. 203­231. Bruno, Giuliana. Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media. Chicago: University of ​ ​ Chicago Press, 2014. Chabot, Pascal. The Philosophy of Simondon: Between Technology and Individuation. Trans. ​ ​ Graeme Kirkpatrick and Aliza Krefetz. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. ​ ​ Chion, Michel. David Lynch. London: British Film Institute, 1995. ​ ​ del Río, Elena. Deleuze and the Cinemas of Performance: Powers of Affection. Edinburgh: ​ ​ Edinburgh University Press, 2008. Fagot­Largeault, Anne. “Simondon, Individuation, and the Life Sciences: Interview with Anne Fagot­Largeault.” Interview by Thierri Bardini. Theory, Culture & Society 31.4 (2014): ​ ​ 141­161. Goodwin, Jonathan. “The Separate Worlds of David Lynch’s Inland Empire.” Quarterly Review ​ ​ ​ of Film and Video 31.4 (2014): 309­321. ​ Grosz, Elizabeth. “Identity and Individuation: Some Feminist Reflections.” Gilbert Simondon: ​ Being and Technology. Eds. Arne De Boever, Alex Murray, Jon Roffe and Ashley ​ Woodward. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012. 37­56. Guattari, Félix. “The Three Ecologies.” New Formations 8, Summer (1989): 131­147. ​ ​ Heath, Stephen. “Narrative Space.” Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader. Ed. ​ ​ Philip Rosen. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. 379­420. Heidegger, Martin. “The Age of the World Picture.” Heidegger: Off the Beaten Track. Eds. and ​ ​ Yudelman 60

Trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. pp. 57­85. Ivakhiv, Adrian. Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature. Waterloo ON: Wilfred ​ ​ University Press, 2013. Kirkpatrick, Graeme. Foreword. The Philosophy of Simondon: Between Technology and ​ Individuation. By Pascal Chabot. Trans. Graeme Kirkpatrick and Aliza Krefetz. London: ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ Bloomsbury, 2013. vii­ix. Lynch, David. Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity. New York: ​ ​ Penguin, 2006. ­­­. “Patti Smith and David Lynch talk Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet and Pussy Riot.” Newsnight Encounters. British Broadcasting Corporation, 14 Nov. 2014. Web. 31 Mar. ​ 2016. Malcom, Derek. “Wild at Heart” Rev. of Wild at Heart, by David Lynch. The Guardian 23 ​ ​ ​ ​ August 1990: n.p. Marks, Laura. Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. Minneapolis: University of ​ ​ Minnesota Press, 2002. Michaud, Yves. “The Aesthetics of Gilbert Simondon: Anticipation of the Contemporary Aesthetic Experience.” Trans. Justin Clemens. Gilbert Simondon: Being and Technology. ​ Eds. Arne De Boever, Alex Murray, Jon Roffe and Ashley Woodward. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012. 121­132. Monani, Salma and Stephen Rust. “Introduction: Cuts to Dissolves—Defining and Situating Ecocinema Studies.” Ecocinema Theory and Practice. Eds. Stephen Rust, Salma Monani, ​ ​ and Sean Cubitt. New York: Routledge, 2013. 1­14. Morton, Timothy. “Dream.” Theorizing the Contemporary, Cultural Anthropology website. 20 ​ ​ February, 2016. ­­­. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. ​ ​ Oxford English Dictionary, “Danger.” Oxford Dictionaries. Oxford English Dictionary, n.d. ​ ​ Web. 15 April 2016. Pick, Anat. “Three Worlds: Dwelling and Worldhood on Screen.” Screening Nature: Cinema ​ Yudelman 61

beyond the Human. Eds. Anat Pick and Guinevere Narraway. New York: Berghahn ​ Books, 2013. Pollmann, Inga. “Invisible Worlds, Visible: Uexküll’s Umwelt, Film, and Film Theory.” Critical ​ ​ ​ Inquiry 39.4 (2013): 777­816. ​ Rodley, Chris. Lynch on Lynch. Boston: Faber and Faber, 1997. ​ ​ Sauvagnargues, Anne. “Crystals and Membranes: Individuation and Temporality.” Trans. Jon Roffe. Gilbert Simondon: Being and Technology. Eds. Arne De Boever, Alex Murray, ​ ​ Jon Roffe and Ashley Woodward. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012. 57­72. Simondon, Gilbert. L'individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d'information. Grenoble: ​ ​ Millon, 2013. ­­­. “The Genesis of the Individual.” Incorporations. Eds. Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter. ​ ​ Trans. Mark Cohen and Sanford Kwinter. Cambridge: Zone Books, 1992. 297­319. Thain, Alanna. “Funny How Secrets Travel: David Lynch’s Lost Highway.” Invisible Culture 8 ​ ​ ​ ​ (2004): n. Pag. Web. 14 February 2016. ­­­. “Rabbit Ears: Locomotion in Lynch’s Inland Empire.” David Lynch in Theory. Ed. Francois ​ ​ ​ ​ Xavier­Gleyzon. Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2010. 86­100. Tønnessen, Morten. "Umwelt Transitions: Uexküll and Environmental Change." Biosemiotics ​ 2.1 (2009): 47­64. Wilson, Eric. The Strange World of David Lynch. New York: Continuum, 2007. ​ ​ Yacavone, Daniel. “Towards a Theory of Film Worlds.” Film­Philosophy 12.2 (2008): 83­108. ​ ​

Films Cited

Blue Velvet. Dir. David Lynch. De Laurentiis Entertainment Group, 1986. ​ Dune. Dir. David Lynch. De Laurentiis Entertainment Group, 1984. ​ Eraserhead. Dir. David Lynch. American Film Institute, 1977. ​ Inland Empire. Dir. David Lynch. StudioCanal, 2006. ​ Lost Highway. Dir. David Lynch. October Films, 1997. ​ Mulholland Drive. Dir. David Lynch. Les Films Alain Sarde, 2001. ​ Six Men Getting Sick. Dir. David Lynch. Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, 1967. ​ Yudelman 62

The Alphabet. Dir. David Lynch. Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, 1968. ​ The Elephant Man. Dir. David Lynch. Brooksfilms, 1980. ​ The Grandmother. Dir. David Lynch. American Film Institute, 1970. ​ The Straight Story. Dir. David Lynch. Asymmetrical Productions, 1999. ​ Twin Peaks. Prod. David Lynch and Mark Frost. Lynch/Frost Productions, 1990. ​ Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. Dir. David Lynch. New Line Cinema, 1992. ​ Wild at Heart. Dir. David Lynch. Propaganda Films, 1990. ​