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Transcript of Our French Cousins: The Franco Assault on Conclusivity in Art and Film As seen In David Lynch’s...
RR d’Annibale
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
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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.
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---. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. 1981. Daniel W. Smith, trans.
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---. 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
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Mark Seem, Helen R. Lane, trans. 1972. Minneapolis: U Minn
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Harper, Graeme, Rob Stone, eds. The Unsilvered Screen London:
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Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits. Bruce Fink, trans. New York: W.W. Norton,
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Lynch, David, dir. “The Alphabet.” 1968. The Shorter Films of David
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Schneider, Stephen Jay. “The Essential Evil in/of Eraserhead.”
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Williams, Linda. “The Critical Grasp: Buñuelian Cinema and Its
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Reading Seminar XI. Albany: SUNY P, 1995. 205-220.
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