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English 272

Seminar Paper

Rob d’Annibale

3/22/08

Our French Cousins:The Franco Assault on Conclusivity in Art and Film

As seen In David Lynch’s Opening Quartet

After slogging its way through the heady political, social

and artistic potentiality of the late 1960s, disillusioned by the

Vietnam War and suicidally situated under the dull but

omnipresent threat of a bolt from the blue, the American

intelligentsia warily engaged radically challenging French

thought. The thoroughgoing assault on representation by Derrida,

Deleuze, Guattari, Foucault, Lyotard, Lacan, et al was an

overturning of the very nature of concepts of linearity and

correspondence. These theoretical swings, particularly indirect

free discourse, problematized presumptions about subjectivity,

semiotics and language, problematizing philosophy, aesthetics,

politics and sexuality in dialogic exchanges resonating through

the academy. Such changes were certainly not limited to

universities and think tanks, and many of these significant,

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resistant strains reached deeply into the cultural realm. But

how deep was the impact on art and film, and would French theory

continue to provide American aestheticians with novel means “to

counter law and utopia or other such satisfactions of negative

schizophrenia” (Lotringer “Introduction” 9)?

When capitalism extends itself through cultural production,

it can problematize numerous cultural fields, adding to the

possibility of new moves. This study employs Deleuzian and, to a

lesser extent and among several others, Lacanian readings of

American director David Lynch’s first four filmic productions,

including three short works and culminating with the cultish,

controversial Eraserhead (1977) in order to map one succession of

French aesthetic thought into America. Set in a decaying slum in

the heart of an urban center with a “protagonist” who may be read

as pure immanence, the primary text is a nightmarish, American

Avant-Garde, non-linear, loosely plotted film, especially fertile

due to its distortions of vision, time, sound and the lead

character’s subjectivity, all of which should generate a

productive assessment well beyond the psychoanalytic and semiotic

readings often associated with this text and which ultimately

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points towards the forms a Deleuzian materialism might take on

today.

Even with some direct evidence, it is always difficult to

configure an understanding of aesthetic influence. The goal of

this project is not to prove that David Lynch’s early work

“follows” a Deleuzian aesthetics or epistemology but rather to

show how the filmmaker’s productions fit a larger assault on

plastic and filmic representation through non-representational

agency largely initiated by the intrusion of French theory into

the United States commencing in the mid-1960s

For Deleuze, while cinema tells its stories (among other

things) by inventing blocks of movement-time and painting does the

same through blocks of lines and color, both must be motivated by

some sort of necessity. If these disciplines do dialogue with one

another, “it is at the level of that which never disengages for

itself, but that which is engaged in all creative disciplines, to

know the constitution of space-time” (“Act” 101). Claiming a

radical transition in cinema after World War II which is

undoubtedly a useful liminality, Deleuze argues that time

increasingly came to stand on its own, replacing the primacy of

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the image of movement with those of time directly, the time-image.

These are haecceties, rhizomatic relations of movement and rest

between molecules or particles, capacities to affect or be

affected” (“Plateaus” 261). Art is that which resists, but in

order for it to become resistant of both the sacred (death) and

the profane (control), it must become “effectively…efficient.”

(“Act” 106). For this, philosophy is both needed and

unnecessary, for Deleuze is not interested in creating a new

method of or for the cinema, only in holding and working them

alongside one another.

The real loser in such an approach was to be representation,

the mimetic correspondence between image and idea. Because

correspondence was a sacred cow, Sylvère Lotringer notes that the

“superproduction” of theoretical writings quickly became its own

barrier. These theories, themselves proliferating series each

extending past its predecessor in terms of time and “speed,”

established new problematics that were resisted. Indeed, it was

not until any French theoretical convergence was “becoming

imperceptible” that its influence could permeate the culture, as

a “nondisjunctive synthesis” (“Theory” 128). This was

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accomplished dialogically and zetetically through the commentary

on the collisions among and between new projects, perhaps mostly

outside the academy. Lotringer’s contribution was through his

journal Semiotext(e), started in 1974 at Columbia University, and

its encapsulations of many of these new ideas in concise,

quotable, instructive pamphlets called “Foreign Agents” which art

critics and academicians would digest but would not quote owing

to their “steal this theory” ambiance (“Theory” 128). Instead,

they would read the real thing. However, according to École

nationale des beaux-arts (Lyon) philosopher Elie During, Deleuze was

both already here and not yet arrived, operating on two

“blackboxing” registers, one as the nomadic popular thinker

“vampirizing” already popular deconstruction and Frankfurt school

thinkers, and the other as himself, an “iconic…French

philosopher” (168).

After a friend’s father gave him a book on ashcan school

painter Robert Henri, fourteen-year old Montanan David Lynch took

to painting with a vengeance, with his subjects most often guns

(Rodley 9). Five years later Lynch enrolled in the Boston Museum

School and where he was first drawn to the work of British

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painter Francis Bacon at a show at the Marlborough Gallery. Lynch

calls Bacon “the number one kinda hero painter,” about whom he

liked “[e]verything,” particularly the way the painter married

subject matter and style, especially “the space, and the slow and

the fast…textures.” Although Lynch notes Bacon’s work inspired

Last Tango in Paris, he himself sees Edward Hopper (see Fig. 1) as a

bigger influence on own his work in cinema, largely due to his

use of America as setting (Rodley 17).

Deleuze’s own study of Bacon in The Logic of Sensation focuses on

the painter’s concern with the expressive materiality of paint

and the conveyance of intense modes of sensation rather than

traditional modes of representation and narration. Deleuze sees

Bacon’s work as circumventing narrative relations between figures

and concentrating instead on “matters of fact” or “brutal facts,”

a move enabling the painter to present the possibilities inherent

in the materiality of the paint itself. Deleuze’s understanding

of Bacon’s work rests on the paintings conveying a special type

of violence associated with “color and line, as a static or

potential violence, a violence of reaction and expression”

(“Sense” xxix). Bacon’s paintings are most clearly understood as

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series, sometimes as triptychs, of rhythmic assemblages, often in

vivid colors including flesh and bone (See Fig. 4). These tones

help delimit this rhythmic interplay where each pushes the other

to its limit. In many works, Bone expands into and through flesh

in spasmodic movements, while flesh sometimes compresses and

descends into bone in order to create a heightened sense of the

violence of the brutality of fact (“Sense” 118).

In explaining the immediate, affective impact of Bacon’s

work, Deleuze draws upon the notion of haptic vision, which he

opposes to the usual representational modes of seeing. This

notion is crucial to Deleuze’s analysis of Bacon’s work and is

drawn from nineteenth century Austrian art theorist Alois Riegl.

Riegl’s main interest was in delineating various historical

manifestations of what he called the human “will to art…a

dynamic, aesthetic impulse, reflecting an innate desire for

change between generations of artists” (Olin 170), with its three

distinct historical manifestations coming from ancient Egypt,

Greece and Rome. Common to all three was the goal of representing

external objects as clear, material entities, and for Riegl then

Deleuze, the ancients all attempted to delimit space in order to

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the problems endemic to visual perception that result from the

eye’s way of perceiving the natural world in two-dimensional

planes through which objects tend to appear to us in a chaotic

mixture (“Sensation” 101). As a result, the ancients were driven

to attempt in their art a representation of individual objects

that was as clear and distinctly delineated as possible,

emphasizing the impenetrability of material objects. Space was

regarded as absence or as a void which represented a negation of

the kind of material stability needed by vision (Olin 137). In

their efforts to comprehend and express the individuality of

objects, the ancients were driven to refuse any reference to the

actual ordinary experience of a subject or individual in their

effort to embody and render objects as absolutely objective.

But the most straightforward means of perceiving an

isolated, separate object from out of the chaos of visual

perception is through a separate modality, touch, which reveals

the enclosed unity of the surface or exterior of the object as

well as reinforcing its material impenetrability (“Sensation” 154

n.7). Yet touch alone cannot yield a comprehensive apprehension

of the complete surface of an object, just discrete elements of

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it. In order to grasp the entire object, one must combine or link

a series of multiple touches through an act of subjective

consciousness and thought. The eye initially takes in a confused

image of colors and planes and only assembles the outlines of

defined individual objects through the synthesis of multiple

perceptions. While touch is superior to vision in grasping the

materiality of objects, vision surpasses touch by informing us of

elements such as height and width, since it is able to synthesize

analogically and digitally (“Sensation” 95). So, it seems that a

comprehensive knowledge and understanding of stable objects as

three-dimensional requires a subjective synthesis of multiple

tactile and visual encounters with the object.

Riegl thus generates an opposition between the

objective/subjective and tactile/optical in his account of the

ancient will to art. The latter opposition between the tactile

and the optical is, subsequently subsumed within vision. Hand and

eye come to reinforce one another, since our visual perceptions

of objects as impenetrable, three dimensional, stable entities

necessarily comes to incorporate and synthesize knowledge gained

from tactile experience. In this way Riegl introduces the notion

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of “tactile” or “haptic” vision or seeing that Deleuze claims

“invites the assumption that the eye itself may fulfill this

nonoptical function” (“Plateaus” 492) in which the contributing

role of the hand and tactility are synthesized.

Within the haptic Deleuze argues that space becomes tactile

as if the eye itself were now a hand caressing one surface after

another without any sense of the overall configuration or mutual

relation of those surfaces. It is a virtual space whose

fragmented components can be assembled in multiple combinations.

In this pure, haptic, “Smooth Space” of close-vision, all

orientation, landmarks and the linkages between things are in

continuous variation as an ongoing transmutation which operates

“step-by-step” according to no pre-determined schema. Since

orientations are never the same and are always changing, there is

no stable unified set of referents, with the interlinkages

themselves constituted according to an emergent realm of dynamic

tactile relationships between and among “monadological points of

view [that] can be interlinked only on a nomad space” (“Plateaus”

494).

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Deleuze and Guattari’s goal for philosophy is for it to

“become worthy of the event,” an aim that requires that we turn

toward the pre-individual field of the virtual, precisely such a

move that they identify as occurring within the work of art

(“Philosophy” 160). The task of art is to capture chaos as

sensation, to construct a “monument” which exists in itself as a

composition independent of the viewer or the creator, “a compound

of percepts and affects” that is a “bloc of sensations” and which

has a reality in the absence of human perception and affection

(“Philosophy” 166). The challenge is to give up the habits of

thinking and perceiving that characterize human experience and to

go beyond them. In other words, the concerns of painting must

turn to the problems of its material specificity and the

reconfiguration of pictorial space that that entails, a concern

with what the material of painting can do, rather than with what

an individual picture represents.

Abstractionist painters of such as Jackson Pollock did just

that, moving away from the figurative in order to work with the

pure elements of painting, color and line (see Fig. 3). They

produced “catastrophes,” paintings which disturb and disrupt the

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order and form of representation and force us to see, new

hallucinatory spaces and new morphological images (“Sensation”

85). What results is a profound disruption of phenomenological

perception. For Deleuze this revolution takes painting from a

logic of representation towards a pure logic of sensation, to the

line that “takes a walk” and the Figure that emerges from the

chaos/germ of the “Diagram” or what Bacon refers to as the

“Graph:”

Very often the involuntary marks are much more deeplysuggestive than others, and those are the moments whenyou feel that anything can happen…The marks are made,and you survey the thing like you would a sort of graph. And yousee within this graph the possibilities of all typesof fact being planted. This is a

difficult thing…Isn’t it that one wants a thing to be asfactual as possible and at

the same time as deeply suggestive or deeply unlocking ofareas of sensation

other than simple illustration of the object that you setout to do? Isn’t that what

all art is about? (Sylvester 56)

For Deleuze these Diagrams allow the emergence of another world

in a work of art. The marks that comprise a Diagram are

irrational, involuntary, accidental, free and random. Deleuze

claims that it is as if the artist’s hand assumes independence

and begins to be guided by other forces, making marks that no

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longer depend upon the artist’s will or vision. Such random,

manual marks attest to the intrusion of another world into the

visual of figuration. But despite its catastrophic nature, the

Diagram is also “a germ of order or of rhythm”. It is a violent

chaos in relation to the figurative givens, but it is a germ of

rhythms in relation to the new order of the painting and unlocks

areas of sensation (“Sensation” 82-83). As Bacon notes:

In the way I work I don’t in fact know very often whatthe paint will do, and it does many things whichare very much better than I could make it do. Is that an

accident?...One is attempting, of course, to keep thevitality of the accident and yet preserve acontinuity…What has never yet been analyzed is why this

particular way of painting is more poignant thanillustration. I suppose…like the image one’s tryingto trap; it lives on its own, and therefore transfers the essence

of the image more poignantly. So that the artistmay be able to open up or rather, should I say, unlockthe valves of feeling and therefore return the onlooker to life

more violently…There is a possibility that you getthrough this accidental thing something much moreprofound than what you really wanted.” (Sylvester 17)

Deleuze and Guattari identify the three necessary elements

of philosophy as the prephilosophical plane it must lay out

(immanence), the persona or personae it must invent (insistence),

and the philosophical concepts it must create (consistency),

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diagrammatic, personalistic, and intensive features’

(“Philosophy” 76–7). That the initial diagrammatic function, the

elaboration of the prephilosophical plane of immanence, is

necessary for the subsequent creation of concepts matches Bacon’s

creative method whose initial act of painting is defined by the

making of random marks and paint “sweeps,” followed by the

tossing of paint onto the canvas from various angles and at

various speeds (“Sensation” 144). Such acts presuppose the

existence of figurative givens on the canvas, “clichés” that must

cleansed in order to allow the genesis of an image” (“Sensation”

xxiii). This physical act which begins a painting lays out an

automatic or random ground that is in contradiction with any pre-

planned figure, a ground that threatens to engulf the act of

figuration it prepares for. The Diagram also lays out a

prepictorial plane of immanence, and it is exactly this creative

practice bound up with diagrammatic elaboration which forms one

of the three fundamental elements of philosophy, albeit a non-

philosophical one precisely because the plane of immanence does

not immediately take effect with concepts but implies

experimentation and “measures that are not very respectable,

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rational, or reasonable.” These measures belong to the order of

dreams, to pathological processes, esoteric experiences,

drunkenness, and excess, what Deleuze terms “the witch’s flight”

(“Philosophy” 41).

But this is not to say that figures may not emerge from the

Diagram, indeed they are essential or, more correctly, what both

composes and underlies them is. Taken from Artaud, Deleuze calls

this element the “body without organs,” an “intense and intensive

body…nonorganic…that when acquir[ing] a body takes on an

excessive and spasmodic appearance…conveyed in the flesh through

a nervous wave or vital emotion.” When the wave encounters the

Forces acting upon the body, the resulting sensation, an

“affective athleticism, ceases to be representative and becomes

real.” This is exactly where Bacon wants the haptic violence

erupting from the paint itself to hit the viewer’s body in

startling, novel and even painful ways, and his Diagrams, parts

of a neutralized organism create a “human visage [that] has not

yet found its face (“Sensation” 40). There are also other forces

at work on the painted Figure and its body as well which deform

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it as it moves from isolation to dissipation to deformation (see

Fig. 4). Although Deleuze asserts that this other force at play

is best seen in Bacon’s triptych assemblages, it’s also available

in single pieces as well. The task of rendering time in its

changing and eternal modes, “to render Time sensible, is in

itself…a task beyond all measure or cadence” (“Sensation” 53).

It would seem that one sure way of connecting these modes of

painting to the creation of film would be to identify the

diagrammatic within the trajectory of filmic production. As he

often does, Lynch provides no such direct connection but instead

cites the fluidity of filmic production and the need for the

auteur and everyone involved with generating the ideas change as

they run through a production to “be in the world of the film.”

Each of the early works profiled herein are drawn from scripts

that not only break the Hollywood “one page equals one minute of

screen time code, but do so willfully. The script for Eraserhead,

an eighty-nine minute film, is twenty-one pages long, forms which

seem to support Lynch’s contention that “What I would be able to

tell you about my intentions in my films is irrelevant:”

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With the paint, I’m not really in control and there’saction and reaction and give and take. When you gettogether with a crew of people that are going to do a

film, at first they have zero idea. And then they read thescript. And then they get closer. They’ll bring aprop to you and you’ll say, “No, no, no, no, that’s wrong

because of this and this and this. And they say Oh! Andnow they’re closer still…They tune in. (Rodley 28)

It seems that Lynch employs several diagrammatics as he works

through a script, but that, as is called for by the messiness of

the medium, the script is a kernel that it is far from being as

fully controlling as it usually is, though certainly forming a

structure, not specifically of plot, but rather of style. The

additional diagrammatics would seem to issue on a scene by scene

basis involving concepts not present at the outset, though

verified in accordance with the director’s vision. At times, of

course, the actors play a part in conceptual change as well,

making the only way to spot Lynch’s diagrams, if they do indeed

exist, by experiencing the outcome.

And that’s exactly what Lynch’s first filmic production, Six

Men Getting Sick, seems to show. In 1967, while attending the

Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, he entered

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the school’s annual, year-end, experimental painting and

sculpture competition. Earlier in the year, he was working in one

of the cubicles in the school’s main studio when he hit upon an

inspiration and a specific synthesis:

I was painting a black painting with some garden, agreen garden. The green plants were sort of coming outof black, real, you know, dark green coming out of

black, and I was looking at this painting and I heard awind, and I saw the painting move a littlebit. And that’s what started the whole thing. I wanted to see

a painting move and have sound to it. And so thatlead to an animated project on a sculptured screen forthis experimental painting and sculpture contest. And I built

a sculptured screen about six feet by eight feet,and I animated a minute of animation to be projectedupon that sculptured screen and I made this siren loop

that went with it. (“Rodley” 37)

With its dual repetitions overall and in and between

Figures, the piece shows the movement out of what might be called

Lynch’s diagrams, which is also working around and between the

surface images and the sculpture beneath. Deleuze maintains…

The diagrams must remain localized, rather thancovering the entire painting (as in Expressionism),and…something must emerge from the diagram…The

diagram dismantles the optical world, but at the same time,it must be reinjected into the visual whole, whereit introduces the haptic world and gives the eye a

properly haptic function. It is color and the relationsbetween colors that form this haptic world and haptic

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sense in accordance with relations of warm and cool, expansion and contraction. (“Sensation” 111)

While the senses are certainly impacted by the

representative aspects of the Figures (three sculpted heads

molded from Lynch’s face and three animated projections onto the

sculptured “screen”) disintegrating (outlined organs descend from

each of the six heads which are then intermittently filled with

color) and bleeding, when these elements are combined with the

movement, non-diegetic siren sound and, eventually, a brief color

wash (red), the affective impact on sensation is palpable and the

viewer is already jarred by the time the figures engage in what

was to become a Lynchian mise-en-scène by spewing bluish vomit

across the movement-image.

Considered with Lynch next two short productions, The Alphabet

(1968) and The Grandmother (1970) it seems that the fledgling

director was tracing out his own problematics. Each develops out

of the previous, not in terms of story but technique and length.

The Alphabet adds a live character and is four minutes long, while

The Grandmother logs in at a “hefty” thirty-four. Each features

increasingly less animation, with subterranean eruptions of the

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three main characters in the later production, erupting out and

then back into animated, subterranean sequences that bookend

rather than frame the “plot” [sic]. Although Lynch’s current,

mainstream work tends to be largely narrative with only

occasional alterations to their temporal linearity, these early

“stories” also add more “plotting.”

Based on the nightmares of Lynch’s wife’s niece who was

feverishly reciting the alphabet in her sleep, Lynch decided to

append live action to simple, childishly drawn animation. sutured

together by the Alphabet Song, which itself moves from childish

chants to the operatic to the ominous. Like his 1992 painting So

This is Love (see Fig. 5), The Alphabet is about childhood, although

the director claims antithetically to his own “idyllic”

upbringing. The letters appear as varying characters and

designs, including life cycle and phallic symbols, including a

birth canal that spews letter A’s. Lynch’s first wife Peggy

appears in white kabuki-like makeup and large, dark sunglasses

cut into the animation (Kaleta 8). As the piece moves into live

action, she is seen in an imposing iron bed, interposed with

black-and-white and color shots of body parts as the animated

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figures decay, wither and die. An affective-image of her face

produces the only dialogue in the piece, ”Remember you are

dealing with the human form.” Some of the animation pelts her

body, resulting in spots of blood splatters onto the sheets

covering the now-writhing woman in the bed who vomits blood as

the piece concludes. Here at the last we see the movement-image

seemingly give way to the “power of repetition-variation” (Cinema

2 102) as it establishes what Lynch characterizes as the “eye-of-

the-duck” scene, his version of the filmic climax:

When you picture a duck you picture a bill, and a head,and a neck and a body and legs. . . . The bill is a certain color and a certain length and a certain texture. And

it is completely different [from anything else on the duck], although there is something in the color and the texture that is a little similar to the legs of the duck

and it is very important that that is the way thatis. Then the head comes up out of that. . . . And the head comes up and comes down into this fantastic S curve. And

the feathers on the head are kind of short and swift because it's faster, the bill and the head have to be a faster area….The head is slower, and the neck has that S curve that lets you come down to the body. The eye wants to go down the S curve and it gets to the feet and it makes the whole trip. (Nochimson 25)

Lynch asserts that the eye's desire to move around the

"fantastic" S curve is the contact with reality, both a function

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of the recognizable shape and something that cannot be read

through a cultural coding dealing with the invisible relationship

between the sparkling eye and the form of the outline. Lynch

explicitly connects this movement with what moves in film

narrative, for it at these moments that his protagonists either

accept losing control and head towards a positive outcome or

reject losing control and are turned towards despair (Nochimson

26). In other words, Lynch’s counter to standard filmic narrative

development is a becoming that moves his protagonists’ arcs far

away from the triumphal trajectories of mainstream film. While

some critics have labeled this as a nightmarish existentialism or

even submission to the Law of the Father, but the eye-of-the-

duck, when accepted, is a joyful, heterosexual, release of

tension rather than a moment of castrated surrender.

In Žižek’s view, this is Lynch’s version of the “’lamella,’:

the libido as an organ without body…the incorporeal life-

substance that persists beyond the circuit of generation and

corruption” that Lacan presents in chapter 15 of Seminar XI, a

shift from the desire to drive (205). Žižek asserts that Lynch’s

“ontology” is based on the discordance between a dreamlike,

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detached reality and the real, a notion that positions him as the

postmodern filmmaker par excellence. Oddly enough, the lamella

doesn’t appear in the most plot-driven of Lynch’s early short

films, The Grandmother, in which a young boy dressed in a tuxedo

and kabuki makeup suffers at the hands of his slovenly, abusive

parents who manhandle and bark at him. After a bedwetting

incident (although the urine is colored red), the boy piles dirt

and roots on his bed (pile of which dot the domestic landscapes

in Eraserhead) and plants a pod like seed from which grows a

grandmother. the relationship is kept upstairs while the parents

eat and drink in the darkened squalor of the apartment below, and

a the child seems to lose his fears. The pair even savors an

erotic kiss, but the grandmother later dies, flapping around the

boy’s room like a wounded bird. He travels to a rural graveyard

where she dies again, driving home the truth. The boy returns to

his bed and the film ends. In this case, Lynch leaves the lamella

unresolved, for although it’s not hard to imagine him rising from

the bed later on, there’s no way to know. In that sense, this

may be a transition from The Alphabet’s screeching, vomiting figure,

and onto protagonist Henry’s rapturous embrace with the bright,

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singing “Woman in the Radiator” that concludes Eraserhead. In

terms of the process enunciated in Difference and Repetition, this

seems to conclude in monstrousness, although it may also simply

be the third term of a process that will reach solution in the

final film of this opening quartet.

One challenge to Deleuzian readings of Lynch is the claim

that he’s merely an American surrealist, a claim he denies by

noting that the only such shock montage production he’s ever

witnessed is what is considered an über text for the movement,

Buñuel’s Un chien andalou (1929), with its famous opening sliced

eyeball. Many of these claims tend to be made on the

representational level, where the incongruity and nightmarishness

and “uncanniness” of the Lynchian montage seems to dominate. In

Lynch’s case, this return of “repressed material that disrupts

unitary identity, aesthetic norms and social order” is only

different that it seems centered in the unconscious mind (Creed

117). And while that may indeed be the case in The Alphabet and

even in The Grandmother, it seems clear that the lamella of

Eraserhead moves Lynch past what Linda Williams identifies as the

Buñuelian disruption of the standard filmic use of “the imaginary

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lure” that results in drawing the human subject “into a symbolic

that governs the loss of the final signified…of the regressive

lure of the mirror-film-imaginary as the possible promise of its

restoration” (204).

One other way Lynch does this in Eraserhead is by never

revealing the lure itself. The narrative and plastic movement in

the film evolves linearly, emerging from a diagrammatic opening

montage in which we see the protagonist’s head positioned beneath

a planetary body. A sperm like mass emerges from Henry’s mouth

and plunges into a milky pool in one of the planetoid’s canyons.

When we next see it, the creature has evolved into a being who is

only able to claim that position because it is so named by

Henry’s girlfriend Mary X’s mother. The “child” swaddled in

bandages is limbless and all head, but it functions like a baby,

cooing and crying and even getting sick, completely dependent on

Mary and Henry. It’s crying even drives the sleepless woman back

to her mother and out of the narrative.

The pre-narrative diagram also features a factory-like

overbeing (?) who pulls on a series of train yard levers to get

things rolling and then appears again as the event comes to a

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shuddering halt. Combined with the socially sanctioned naming of

the baby, the opening, pre-narrative montage seems to imply a

theme Lynch himself has articulated, namely that the pervasive

twentieth century fear that the culture we have built on is not

firmly grounded in rock. (Nochimson 32). Indeed, the disparate

images throughout the film, coupled with a loose narrative

structure, seems to challenge us to figure out just what is going

on as we watch him confront what Lynch has repeatedly called his

“dark and troubling faults.” Henry’s affect gives few clues for

he says little that’s not mundane and his facial expressions

issue mostly from his eyes, with darting, paranoid or fearful

looks and even the occasional smile. Mary is a fearsome, fawning

girl, who shares an infrequent seizure with her stern mother, at

least when Henry visits the parent’s apartment. The plumber-

father tells silly stories and implores Henry to “carve” into the

man-made mini-chickens served for dinner. When Henry reluctantly

obliges, the bird spread s its legs and emits a bloody stream

that seems a rather trite way of staging the situation, although

Mary shows no visible signs of being pregnant. At that point, the

mother demands to know if Henry and Mary have had “sexual

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intercourse,” as she backs him into a corner and seals the deal

with a kiss on his lips that he struggles against while a

horrified Mary collapses on the floor. The next time we see the

“happy couple,” language has again shown itself to be

determinate, as they and the baby are ensconced in Henry’s

apartment.

The world of the story is indeed dark, with Lynch relying on

a factory setting that he asserts is based on a Hopper painting

(see Fig. 2). The dirty, decrepit, mostly abandoned factory

setting is traversed by rail lines, with the only street life

being urchins and homeless men. The soundtrack, which Lynch

himself designed, adds to the incongruity of the world, for

although the sounds of rain are articulated to a storm, the sonic

swishes and creaks buttress the idea we may be in the real and

not the actual. Henry claims to be “on vacation” from his job at

a printing factory, though there’s no indication of a job or even

the plant! Aside from a prostitute living across the hall in his

building and two men running a pencil factory, the world is

sparsely populated. But that doesn’t matter, for the most

significant setting in the film overall is the radiator in his

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apartment, behind which is a lighted stage and a blond woman with

scarred, chipmunk-like cheeks who sings “In Heaven, everything is

fine, In Heaven, everything is fine, You got your good things and

I’ve got mine” while smiling and clasping her hands in a

prayerful grip.

Once Mary is driven out by the demanding baby’s crying,

Henry engages the woman across the hall and they have sex. Henry

is hounded by a mail delivery of a small box containing what

seems to be a withered sperm, which he hides away. During one of

his peeks at The Lady in the Radiator, she giggles and crushes

several vital versions of the creatures, seemingly indicating

there may be a way out from under it all for Henry, crushing

“material and energy back into matter” before it can inflict

itself upon Henry again (Nochimson 159). First, though, he is

disappointed to learn that the woman across the hall is a

prostitute, a discovery that literally knocks his head off, which

is picked up by an urchin and turned into pencils at the factory.

Clearly, this is a world broken down and nearly abandoned,

one element that has led critics to consider it a

psychological/dream state and social commentary. Such appraisals

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miss the boat, though, for every filmic element is aimed at

Henry’s “Pure Becoming” in line with the Deleuzian First Series.

The “pure events” of the story elude any articulated present

except the one of the film running, “a paradox of infinite

identity” (“Sense” 2). The simulacrimal state of the world, the

dualities hidden in the characters such as avaricious nurturers

and the way language fixes and transcends limits also speak to

Henry’s pure becoming, at least in the world of the narrative.

Rather than the subconscious, this world seems like an

unconceivable plane of immanence (During 180).

This change is signified by the gathering of energy after

Henry gets his head back. Up to this point, the shadowy world

within and without structures has only been broken by failing

light fixtures and a lightning-less storm. But now, the radiator

lady’s line changes to “You’ve got your good things and You got

mine,” and Henry, after failing to gain another tryst with the

woman from across the hall and getting laughed at by the baby,

attacks the creature, cutting open its bandages and stabbing its

organs, which resemble the X family’s industrially created mini-

chicken. In challenging Nochimson’s contention that the Lady in

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the radiator “represents a feminine energy that prohibits

castration,” Steven Jay Schneider claims that her siren’s call to

suicide, her stomping of the sperm-like creatures, and Henry’s

attack on the baby really indicate the nature the evil that rules

of Eraserhead (16). But as female dominated as the complete range

of montage we see in the story is, it’s tough to see her as some

sort of death figure, especially since Henry’s seeming libidinal

angst is satisfied when he crosses the edge of the stage behind

the radiator and touches the lady on the shoulder, flooding the

frame with light in what seems to be the lamella to the eye-of-

the-duck that starts with Henry’s attack. While a better counter

to this reading is the notion that bidirectionality of becoming

does not tolerate a before or after, Henry’s final disposition

and the destruction of the lever-puller and planetoid seem to be

libratory, especially since he seemed to be living in a hellish

world which infanticide would not deliver him from in a positive

way.

While there is no evidence that Lynch has ever read Deleuze,

the influence of French theory on this postmodern American auteur

would, appropriately, seem to be justified in terms of

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bidirectionality through the work of Francis Bacon, whom Deleuze

interviewed before writing The Logic of Sensation. A productive

trajectory in this light would seem to be to trace the

diagrammatic elements herein through Lynch’s more recent body of

work, for it seems certain that the director’s tightly closed

lips and rhizomatic approach to filmmaking are unlikely to yield

up any more conclusive proof. In any event, it is certainly

clear that whatever the route, the Deleuzian attempt to broaden

philosophy has made quite an impact on these shores.

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Fig. 1 Edward Hopper Early Sunday Morning, 1930 http://www.artchive.com/artchive/H/hopper/earlysun.jpg.html

Fig. 2 Edward Hopper, House by a Railroad, 1925 http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?object_id=78330

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Fig 3. Jackson Pollack, Blue Poles November 11, 1952http://www.nga.gov.au/International/Catalogue/Detail.cfm?IRN=36334&MnuID=2&GalID=1

Fig. 4 Francis Bacon, Figure at a Washbasin, 1976http://francis-bacon.cx/1976_77.html

Fig. 5 David Lynch, So This is Love, 1992http://www.thecityofabsurdity.com/paintings/thislov.html

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Works Consulted

Braziel, Jana Evans. “‘In Dreams…’: Gender, Sexuality and

Violence in the Cinema of David

Lynch.” Sheen and Davison. 107-118.

Creed, Barbara. “The Untamed Eye and the Dark Side of

Surrealism.” Harper and Stone. 134-

142.

Deleuze, Gilles. Bergsonism. 1966. Hugh Tomlinson, Barbara

Habberjam, trans. New York:

Zone, 1997.

---. Cinema 1: The Movement Image. 1983. Hugh Tomlinson, Barbara

Habberjam, trans.

Minneapolis: U Minn P, 1986

---. Cinema 2: The Time Image. Hugh Tomlinson, trans. 1985.

Minneapolis: U Minn P, 1989.

---. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. 1981. Daniel W. Smith, trans.

Minneapolis: U Minn

P, 1982.

---. The Logic of Sense. Mark Lester, trans. 1969. New York, Columbia

UP, 1990.

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---. “What is the Creative Act?” Lotringer and Cohen. 99-107.

Deleuze, Gilles, Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and

Schizophrenia. Robert Hurley,

Mark Seem, Helen R. Lane, trans. 1972. Minneapolis: U Minn

P, 1983.

---. A Thousand Plateaus. 1980. Brian Massumi, trans. Minneapolis: U

Minn P, 1987.

---. Difference and Repetition. Paul Patton, trans. 1968. New York, Columbia UP, 1994.

---. What is philosophy? 1991. Hugh Tomlinson, Graham Burchell,

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Columbia UP, 1994.

During, Elie. “Blackboxing in Theory: Deleuze versus Deleuze.”

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Harper, Graeme, Rob Stone, eds. The Unsilvered Screen London:

Wallflower, 1977.

---. “Introduction: The Unsilvered Screen.” Harper and Stone. 1-

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Kaleta, Kenneth C. David Lynch. New York: Twayne, 1993.

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Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits. Bruce Fink, trans. New York: W.W. Norton,

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Lotringer, Sylvre, Sande Cohen. French Theory in America. New York:

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---. “Doing Theory.” Lotringer and Cohen. 125-161.

---. “Introduction.” Lotringer and Cohen. 1-9.

Lynch, David, dir. “The Alphabet.” 1968. The Shorter Films of David

Lynch. Abserdia, 2002.

---. Eraserhead. Subversive Cinema, 1977.

---. “The Grandmother.” 1968. The Shorter Films of David Lynch.

---. “Six Men Getting Sick.” 1967. The Shorter Films of David Lynch.

Nochimson, Martha P. The Passion of David Lynch. Austin: U Texas P,

1997.

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Penn State UP, 1992.

Pasolini, Pier Paolo. “The Cinema of Poetry.” 1965. Movies and

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Rodley, Chris, ed. Lynch on Lynch. London: Faber and Faber, 1997.

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Schneider, Stephen Jay. “The Essential Evil in/of Eraserhead.”

Sheen and Davison. 5-18.

Sheen, Erica, Annette Davison, eds. The Cinema of David Lynch. London:

Wallflower, 2004.

Sylvester, David. Interviews with Francis Bacon: The Brutality of Fact. 1975.

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Thames & Hudson, 1988.

Williams, Linda. “The Critical Grasp: Buñuelian Cinema and Its

Critics.” Dada and Surrealist

Film. Rudolf E. Kuenzli, ed. Boston: MIT P, 1996.

Žižek, Slavoj. “The Lamella of David Lynch.” Richard Feldstein,

Bruce Fink, Maire Jaanus, eds.

Reading Seminar XI. Albany: SUNY P, 1995. 205-220.

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