Musical Tour of the Bizarre: Popular Music As Fantasy in David Lynch
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A Musical Tour of the Bizarre University Press Scholarship Online Oxford Scholarship Online Popular Music and the New Auteur: Visionary Filmmakers after MTV Arved Ashby Print publication date: 2013 Print ISBN-13: 9780199827336 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2014 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199827336.001.0001 A Musical Tour of the Bizarre Popular Music as Fantasy in David Lynch Gene Willet DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199827336.003.0004 Abstract and Keywords The films of David Lynch are full of ambiguities that derive from his habitual distortion of time, inversion of characters, and creation of ironic, dreamlike worlds that are mired in postmodern irony and crisis. While these ambiguities have been explored from numerous angles, scholars have paid limited attention to Lynch’s use of music. This chapter explores the relationship between popular music and fantasy through Slavoj Žižek’s particular lens of Lacanian psychoanalysis where fantasy plays a crucial role in helping psychoanalytical subjects work through their psychical crises. In particular, this chapter looks at Blue Velvet, 1986; Lost Highway, 1996; and Mulholland Dr., 2001 to show how Lynch employs popular music to manage and move beyond the particular crises experienced by the characters—and also the viewers— demonstrating how Lynch’s seemingly incoherent narratives can be illuminated by an examination of the music. Keywords: david lynch, slavoj žižek, lacanian psychoanalysis, blue velvet, lost highway, mulholland dr, popular music, fantasy, postmodern irony Page 1 of 31 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use (for details see http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy). Subscriber: Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology; date: 25 May 2018 A Musical Tour of the Bizarre Half the film is picture, the other half is sound. They’ve got to work together…each piece that ends up in the film supports the scene and makes the whole greater than the sum of the parts. David Lynch1 Lately I feel films are more and more like music…. Music deals with abstractions and, like film, it involves time. It has many different movements, it has much contrast. And through music you learn that, in order to get a particular beautiful feeling, you have to have started far back, arranging certain things in a certain way. You can’t just cut to it. David Lynch2 Issues of Music in the Films of David Lynch Those who see a David Lynch film are almost sure to become transfixed by an image they “cannot get over,” as Michel Chion puts it.3 Viewers are disturbed by his extreme representations, such as the vomiting sculptured faces in Six Men Getting Sick (1967)4; the grotesque, non- human infant of Henry and his girlfriend in Eraserhead (1977); the repulsive, disfigured body of John Merrick in The Elephant Man (1980); the sadistic rape of Dorothy by Frank Booth in Blue Velvet (1986); and the plastic-wrapped, decomposing body of Laura Palmer in the television series Twin Peaks (1990–1991). Not only do such images stretch the limits of interpretation or even go so far as to defy meaning, Lynch’s habitual distortion of time, inversion of characters, and complex, nonlinear narrative structures in films (p.88) like Lost Highway (1997), Mulholland Drive (2001), and Inland Empire (2006) challenge the viewer’s ability to follow the plot. Adding to the confusion is Lynch’s refusal to explain his films. When once asked what Wild at Heart (1990) was about, Lynch responded, “Well, it’s about one hour and [45] minutes.”5 Such rebuffs of explanation have left the door wide open for audiences to propose their own interpretations leading to a variety of contrasting—and even contradictory—readings including postmodern, New Age, conservative, feminist, transcendentalist, psychoanalytical, and post-postmodern.6 While these readings may differ significantly in their analysis of Lynch’s films, they all treat Lynch as an auteur who has something important to say. In particular, Lynch’s very ambiguity seems to endow his works with a unique, distinct, and even revelatory perspective on ourselves and the world in which we live, even if that perspective is “weird,” Page 2 of 31 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use (for details see http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy). Subscriber: Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology; date: 25 May 2018 A Musical Tour of the Bizarre “impossible,” “strange,” “perverse,” “nightmarish,” or “ridiculous”—to name just a few of the critical responses.7 Although these films have been explored from numerous angles, scholars have paid limited attention to Lynch’s use of music. This neglect is surprising given Lynch’s emphasis on sound and music in the quotes at the beginning of this chapter. Typical discussions of Lynch’s use of music point out how it supports the image (delegating music to its usual, secondary role of support), how Lynch’s collaboration with composers and sound designers is uncommon in the Hollywood system, or reveal where Lynch got the idea to use a particular piece of music. Such discussions provide important basic information but offer little insight into what work music does in his films.8 Given the place of music in Lynch’s movies, turning an ear toward that music can only help us better understand the workings of his cinematic imagination. Page 3 of 31 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use (for details see http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy). Subscriber: Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology; date: 25 May 2018 A Musical Tour of the Bizarre Popular Music as Fantasy According to Michel Chion, there is nothing more common than an auteur who creates films, but films that create an auteur are rather rare. Such is the case, Chion argues, with Lynch.9 An auteur is a film director whose films are so distinctive that he or she is perceived as the “author” not only of a particular film, but of a visual style and thematic fixation that runs consistently across a body of work. The very fact that one can refer to a Lynchian style testifies to the fact that Lynch is an auteur, even if that style has yet to be clearly defined. This chapter argues that a significant characteristic of the Lynchian style is his use of popular music to create dreamlike fantasy worlds that function differently than fantasy typically does in film. Specifically, I examine music’s relationship to Lacanian fantasy in three of Lynch’s films: Blue Velvet (1986), Lost Highway (1996), and Mulholland (p.89) Drive (2001). These movies, a sample of Lynch’s work from the last three decades, allow us to track his constant employment and development of this particular stylistic device. The connection of music and fantasy is nothing new to film; the Hollywood musical has always relied on song to help construct an idealized world where characters stage the realization of their desires: Orphans sing about a better “Tomorrow,” a day filled with sun and hope; a young girl dreams of a world “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” where all her dreams will come true; and who among us hasn’t dreamed of a “White Christmas” with family and friends? But music and fantasy have worked together to construct fantasy worlds in nonmusical films too, and even in the early days of film. For example, Merian Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack’s King Kong (1933) incorporated relatively little music for the first part of the film and its representation of the cold, drab reality of depression-era New York City; but the soundtrack explodes during the more fantastical part of the film featuring the great Kong. And Michael Curtiz uses music in Casablanca (1942) to represent the nostalgic dream of an idealized past where a lover can embrace his love and “a kiss” is still “just a kiss.” If such tyings of music to fantasy are nothing new to film, Lynch is new in the type of fantasy worlds he creates with the help of music. Fantasy in the cinematic sense is usually characterized as a type of constructed dream world where the poor peasant becomes rich, the rich celebrity returns to being an average Joe, the shy boy gains the affection of the unapproachable girl, or the unnoticed girl catches the eye of her Prince Charming. In other words, the fantasy world is usually portrayed as one where we can experience the fulfillment and satisfaction of our deepest desires, and the use of music in film as a cue for this type of fantasy is nothing new. The Lynchian relationship Page 4 of 31 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use (for details see http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy). Subscriber: Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology; date: 25 May 2018 A Musical Tour of the Bizarre between the aural and the imaginary differs, however, in that this filmmaker uses music to generate visions representing fantasies in the more specific, psychoanalytical sense.