The Film Paintings of David Lynch: Challenging Film Theory

By Allister Mactaggart

One of the most distinguished filmmakers working today, David Lynch is a director whose vision of cinema is firmly rooted in fine art. He was motivated to make his first film as a student because he wanted a painting that “would really be able to move.” Most existing studies of Lynch, however, fail to engage fully with the complexities of his films’ relationship to other art forms. The Film Paintings of David Lynch fills this void, arguing that Lynch’s cinematic output needs to be considered within a broad range of cultural references.

Aiming at both Lynch fans and film studies specialists, Allister Mactaggart addresses Lynch’s films from the perspective of the relationship between commercial film, avant-garde art, and cultural theory. Individual Lynch films—The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, Lost Highway, The Straight Story, Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire—are discussed in relation to other films and directors, illustrating that the solitary, or seemingly isolated, experience of film is itself socially, culturally, and politically important. The Film Paintings of David Lynch offers a unique perspective on an influential director, weaving together a range of theoretical approaches to Lynch's films to make exciting new connections among film theory, art history, psychoanalysis, and cinema.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: May 14, 2014
• ISBN: 9781841503875

Allister Mactaggart

Allister Mactaggart is a senior lecturer at the Directorate of Art and Design, Chesterfield College and an associate lecturer of Leeds Metropolitan University. He teaches film studies and art history, specializing in David Lynch, psychoanalysis, and visual culture.

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The Film Paintings of David Lynch Challenging Film Theory

Allister Mactaggart

First published in the UK in 2010 by

Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK

First published in the USA in 2010 by

Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,

Chicago, IL 60637, USA

Copyright © 2010 Intellect Ltd

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover designer: Holly Rose

Copy-editor: Rebecca Vaughan-Williams

Typesetting: Mac Style, Beverley, E. Yorkshire

ISBN 978-1-84150-332-5 / EISBN 978-1-84150-387-5

Printed and bound by Gutenberg Press, Malta.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Towards a Palimpsest

Chapter 1: Ever Died? Ever Failed? No Matter. Die Again. Fail Better. Immanence and Transcendence In Twin Peaks (With Apologies To Samuel Beckett)

Chapter 2: Reasons to be Tearful: Snapshots of Lynchian Excess

Chapter 3: Driven to Distraction: Hitching a Ride along the Lynchian Highway

Chapter 4: Pierced by the Past: Filmic Trauma; Remembering and Forgetting

Chapter 5: ‘It is Happening Again’: Experiencing the Lynchian Uncanny

Chapter 6: The Return of the Repressed: INLAND EMPIRE, DavidLynch.Com, and the Re-emergence of Film Painting

Conclusion: Stitching up Lynch

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

There are many people to whom I owe a debt of gratitude with the publication of this book, some of whom may not realize just how instrumental they have been in the overall process.

The development of my academic interest in film studies, art history and cultural studies dates back to the mid- to late 1980s when I was spending more and more time in art galleries, at the cinema, listening to pop music and leafing through magazines, pondering in ever more detail the range of images and sounds I was experiencing. Looking for a way to develop my growing interests, I happened upon an A-level evening class in the history of art at Sheffield College. Entering into the near empty building for the first time, with some trepidation, on a cold, dark January evening in 1988, I ventured into a strange and delightful world of clandestine encounters with a wealth of visual materials that initiated an intellectual process which has increased in complexity and enjoyment from that day forth. The enthusiasm of the tutor, Neil Marchant, was intoxicating and we neophytes readily took our engagement with the images encountered from the classroom to the pub to continue our discussions beyond the lessons.

At the end of the course, knowing that I did not want to curtail my new found love of the subject, I then went on to take a degree at that wonderful institution, The Open University, for which I have nothing but praise and admiration, and where I benefitted from an excellent education. In particular, Pamela Bracewell-Homer was a tutor without equal, whose teaching has been instrumental in providing me with the necessary strategies for independent learning which have been invaluable to me throughout my subsequent academic career.

Following my degree I then went on to undertake postgraduate work at Leeds Metropolitan University, the University of Leeds and Middlesex University, where staff and students alike provided a fertile ground for ideas to be nurtured and passions developed. At Leeds Metropolitan University Ron Brown was a most supportive tutor who kindly pointed me in the direction of Adrian Rifkin as a potential supervisor when I came to propose undertaking a PhD. Adrian’s intellectual input, both over the period of the PhD and beyond, has been invaluable in providing a framework for me to develop my work in unexpected but rewarding ways and I hope that this book, in some small way, repays his advice and guidance. Similarly, Elizabeth Cowie and Rob Stone have provided most helpful comments upon the work but, needless to say, any errors or misunderstandings lie firmly at my door.

It saddens me greatly when I hear of funding cuts for lifelong education. Without that initial opportunity to study at evening class and beyond on a part-time basis, my new found interests would probably have fallen away due to the lack of academic support to nurture my intellectual curiosity. What is often forgotten by those who hold the purse strings is that these courses offer a wide range of benefits, both educational and social, as well as providing opportunities to take up courses that the strictures of the mainstream educational system may bypass. And students, who dedicate long hours to their studies, in the evenings and at weekends and during holiday periods, repay the initial investment many times over.

Sadly, my father did not live to see the publication of this book but I know that he would have been proud to see it in print, although he would have no doubt chided me for my tardiness.

To Pip Mactaggart I can only express again my love and gratitude for putting up with my Lynch obsession (which isn’t over yet), even if she has declined to sit through all of the films with me. Our delightful yellow Labrador Retriever, Tallulah, has provided me with much needed restorative breaks from my books and the computer when she sensed that I had spent too long neglecting the delights of chasing a tennis ball. She certainly isn’t the angriest dog in the world.

My inestimable thanks go to David Lynch for creating these singular cinematic worlds to which I now attach my supplementary readings. I trust that he doesn’t mind the intrusion.

Finally, but most importantly, I would like to thank Intellect for agreeing to publish this book and for the supportive manner in which they have assisted me in bringing it to fruition. I would especially like to thank Sam King who has been a wonderful book publishing manager throughout, making the process appear effortless and enjoyable, for me at least.

Introduction: Towards a Palimpsest

To be a theoretician of the cinema, one should ideally no longer love the cinema and yet still love it: have loved it a lot and only detached oneself from it by taking it up again from the other end, taking it as the target for the very same scopic drive which had made one love it. (Metz 1982: 15)

And this year I shall have to articulate what serves as the linchpin of everything that has been instituted on the basis of analytic experience: love. (Lacan 1999: 39)

You know what a love letter is? It’s a bullet from a fuckin’ gun, fucker. You receive a love letter from me, you’re fucked forever…You understand, Fuck? (Frank Booth to Jeffrey Beaumont in Blue Velvet (1986))

Figure 1: Dorothy Vallens performing at The Slow Club, Blue Velvet (1986).

A cinematic love letter

As far as I recall, I first became aware of David Lynch’s work in 1986/7. I do not remember exactly when as I do not keep a diary and, as a result, my understanding or recording of time and memory is not archived in any logically structured written format. Consequently my memories ebb and flow in ways which disturb any logical sense of diachronic understanding, but I will give you my recollections of that first encounter which was when Blue Velvet came out and I went to see a screening at the Anvil cinema in Sheffield. The Anvil was the precursor and poor cousin of the Showroom, the current state-of-the-art independent cinema which is situated in the Cultural Industries Quarter of the city. Prior to the opening of the Showroom the Anvil was the place to see independent and non-mainstream films. It consisted of three small screens situated at ground-floor level beneath the Grosvenor House Hotel in the city centre.

I used to enjoy going to this cinema on a Saturday afternoon, for a treat after a heavy week’s work, when it was relatively quiet and one could really enjoy the film in a half-filled auditorium. It always felt such an illicit pleasure being ensconced in the darkened space, knowing that daylight was blocked out while so many people went about shopping, socializing and generally fulfilling the demands of quotidian life outside. On the occasion I first saw Blue Velvet I remember that it was a pleasantly warm day as I drove in to the city centre. In some ways, now that I come to write about it, it feels as if it was recent, not over twenty years ago. I remember being excited, as usual, going in to buy my ticket and taking a seat mid-way back from the screen, my preferred obsessional location. As I recall there were only about twelve other people there, one of whom, a middle-aged man, walked out half-way through.

The auditorium was small and comforting and lined with heavy red velvet drapes. They had a thick texture intended to blot out sounds from the other auditoria. This textural quality was then uncannily echoed in the title sequence of the film as the close-up shots of blue velvet softly rustles like animistic tree bark. The only difficulty I had with the venue was the acoustics, because even with these drapes one could sometimes hear sounds from the film in the adjoining auditorium, and I seem to recall some annoyance at one stage as strange, muffled, uninvited sounds from another film broke through the party wall to my left-hand side. But again, in retrospect, this seems completely apposite to the experience of watching Blue Velvet. Indeed this whole recollection of seeing the film feels most peculiarly ‘Lynchian’.

At the end of the screening I remember feeling stunned, baffled and yet elated. I remained seated for some time trying to make sense of what I had just seen. Eventually, I put on my coat and walked slowly out of the auditorium. But I did not want to go home or even leave the cinema building straightaway. And I was not the only one. As I milled about near the sales counter I remember that there was a group of three women nearby to my right who huddled together in shock to discuss what they had seen. I remember that one of the women, crouching on her haunches, was visibly upset. I seem to recall the tenor of their talk as I (illicitly) listened in like Jeffrey Beaumont, becoming a character from a Lynchian film that had started after the screening had ended, or more probably continued beyond the screening, giving the film an afterlife in the rapidly becoming post-industrial steel city of Sheffield and not the timber town of Lumberton, to see if I could make sense of my experience through their comments. Most of the talk revolved around the ‘primal scene’ of Frank Booth with Dorothy Vallens as Jeffrey watches from the slatted wardrobe doors. I have put ‘primal scene’ in quotation marks because this was not a term that I was aware of at the time and which has only come to make sense for me subsequently in light of my readings around this film.

While the group of women were undeniably shocked by this scene they also appeared to feel that it, and the film generally, offered an insight into the darker recesses of the psyche which, although problematic to them, articulated complexities of sexuality and sexual difference that were not often shown in mainstream cinema. Feeling that I, like Jeffrey, was voyeuristically taking advantage of my situation by watching and listening into their conversation and not knowing if I too was becoming ‘a detective or a pervert’,¹ I left the cinema and in a delightfully bewildered state drove home.

Re-reading the paragraphs above I am aware that there is a great deal of retrospective commentary on this scene, my cinematic primal scene, you could say. At the time I do not think I had any detailed comprehension of the complexities of what I had witnessed, but that its effect/affect over me was such that I desperately wanted to watch the film again, which I did the following week. Following that I became more interested in hunting out Lynch’s work. I remember, shortly afterwards, seeing the poster for his first feature film Eraserhead and being transfixed by the image of Henry Spencer, but it was not until much later that I saw the film. I also recall reading some of the advanced information for Twin Peaks which caught my attention. I soon became an avid follower of both the television series and the resultant ‘prequel’ feature film, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. Since that initial introduction to Lynch’s work I have kept a close eye out for his output in its various forms.

I think it is true to say that seeing Blue Velvet that afternoon, and wanting to know more or understand something of what I had seen, was one of the reasons for my initial entry into my mature academic life in film studies, art history and cultural studies. This body of work is, therefore, the ‘Lynchpin’ for my own, cinematic analytical experience.

David Lynch’s film paintings

For a long time much more was known about Lynch’s films and work on television than his painting and other artwork. Partly this was due to Lynch’s desire to safeguard his art against accusations of ‘Celebrity Painting’ (quoted in Rodley 1997: 28). However, in recent years, due to an increased awareness about his overall creative output with the publication of his books, Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness and Creativity in 2006 and Images in 1994; numerous exhibitions of his work shown in the United States, Japan and Europe (such as David Lynch: The Air is on Fire held at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris in 2007, which gave European audiences a privileged opportunity to assess the range of his artistic output); his website DavidLynch.com and videos/DVDs such as Pretty As a Picture, Dynamic:01 The Best of DavidLynch.com and Lynch (One); there is generally much greater knowledge about his overall practice and the relationship between his film and television work and his other wide-ranging artistic endeavours.

In a story that he has repeated many times over the years, Lynch tells us that he started to make films when he was a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of Arts in Philadelphia in the mid-1960s. One day as he was working in his studio he stood back from an ‘almost all-black painting’ and recounts that:

I’m looking at this figure in the painting, and I hear a little wind, and see a little movement. And I had a wish that the painting would really be able to move, you know, some little bit. And that was it. (Quoted in Rodley 1997: 37)

At this moment he ‘imagined a world in which painting would be in perpetual motion. I was very excited and began to make films which looked like moving paintings, no more and no less’ (quoted in Chion 2006: 9).

The genesis of his film practice via his ‘visionary’ engagement with one of his paintings is central, I would argue, to an understanding of this body of work. It is not tangential to it or only of minor significance; it helps to place the films within a fine art context and sensibility which needs to be accounted for in any critical analysis. His first ‘film’, Six Men Getting Sick (1967), produced when he was a second-year student, consisted of a specially designed sculpture-screen, the surface of which contained reliefs in the shape of heads and arms cast from Lynch’s body by his friend Jack Fisk, onto which a one-minute film loop was projected. The animated film painting appeared on the screen in such a way that the sculpted heads appeared to be transformed into stomachs which caught fire and then vomited, with a siren being used as the soundtrack to the piece (Figure 2).

Film allowed Lynch to add movement and sound to the muteness and static nature of his paintings as well as an opportunity to extend beyond their frame. The interconnection between painting, movement and sound is integral to all of his subsequent film work. From his initial experiments he was encouraged to make a grant application to the American Film Institute which gave him a place and money to start work on Eraserhead.

In terms of translating paintings into narrative sequences for film, Lynch has adhered to the teaching of Frank Daniel, Dean of the Czechoslovakian Film School, who taught him at the American Film Institute to construct films by putting down ideas for 70 scenes on three-inch by five-inch cards. This method of constructing film allows for discontinuity and a break up in the linear pattern of narrative and in part, I would argue, accounts for the emphasis upon the visual (and acoustic) rather than reliance upon Hollywood narrative and generic structures in this body of work.²

Figure 2: Still from Six Men Getting Sick (1967).

There does appear to be a developing acknowledgement of the importance of painting upon Lynch’s films. In Greg Olson’s magisterial biographical study, David Lynch: Beautiful Dark, he remarks that ‘Many of Lynch’s films are more like cinematic paintings than literary constructs, canvases vibrant with an action-painter’s abstract strokes of mood and atmosphere, bold splashes of surging grief, desire, fear, and love’ (Olson 2008: 188). And he goes on to remark that ‘Lynch’s modus operandi remains that of a painter…treating a film set like an unfinished canvas that he’s still actively adding to’ as the work develops via intuition and experimentation rather than detailed planning (Olson 2008: 289). Lynch’s most recent film, INLAND EMPIRE (2006), is manifestly even more experimental than his previous work, and on the DVD Lynch (One) he details the open nature of the filmmaking process which developed intuitively without an overall plan to guide it. In terms of the artist’s intentionality, Lynch’s devotion to transcendental meditation, with the opportunity to delve into an ocean of pure consciousness that he links to the unified field of modern science, can account for some of this willingness to embrace chance in the making of the work and the prospects for it all coming together in the end, but it does not account for the full complexity of the works’ meaning(s). As Lynch acknowledges, ‘What I would be able to tell you about my intentions in my films is irrelevant. It’s like digging up someone who died over four hundred years ago and asking them to tell you about his book’ (quoted in Chion 2006: 114).

We need, however, to consider the relationship between art and film, between still and moving images and a range of theoretical positions, if we are to engage fully with these film paintings. The contemporary French philosopher Jacques Rancière makes the point that:

Cinema, like painting and literature, is not just the name of an art whose processes can be deduced from the specificity of its material and technical apparatuses. Like painting and literature, cinema is the name of an art whose meaning cuts across the borders between the arts. (Rancière 2006a: 4, emphasis in the original)

So while there is a necessary requirement to think about the specificity of film as we engage with Lynch’s cinema, I would also argue that we have to think about the relationship between film and other art forms to consider fully the ramifications of the work. In the catalogue to the exhibition of Lynch’s artwork in Paris in 2007, the philosopher Boris Groys argues that Lynch has transposed the tragic tradition of European modernism of twentieth-century art in the work of the expressionists and the surrealists onto film through the (re)-narrativization of the modernist image. As such, Groys suggests that:

The modernist image comes into existence through a struggle against any kind of narrativity; Lynch, however, began to integrate apparently modernist images into his stories quiet early on. I would consider this (re)-narrativization of the modernist image to be the main method employed by Lynch in his paintings and drawings, as well as his films. (Groys and Ujica 2007: 108–109)

This dialectic between stasis and movement, between painting and film, between the autonomous image and diachronic narrative, thereby provides us with the opportunity to reflect on Lynch’s work within a much wider framework than has perhaps been offered so far in the critical engagements with these film paintings.

There is a substantial and growing body of secondary materials about Lynch’s films.³ This attests to the intriguing nature of these works and their importance in debates about contemporary issues in critical theory, together with the passionate attachments of the writers to Lynch’s cinema. Many of the books follow a linear trajectory tracing the auteur’s signature as it develops across the individual films. As many of the secondary sources on Lynch regard him as an auteur I feel that I need to consolidate my views on this term, to position myself from the outset, so that I do not have to keep returning to it throughout. Broadly, I adopt positions from Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault in relation to the figure of the author. Barthes’ argument about the death of the author are well known, and indeed contested. In several quarters there have been attempts to bring the author back in to the frame (see, for example, Burke 1998). However, as Barthes (1977: 148) writes, ‘Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing’. However, Foucault’s explication of the notions of the author’s name and the author function shows just how difficult it is to completely dispose of these ideas. As Adrian Rifkin (2000: 5) puts it in his book on Ingres,

in Michel Foucault’s terms, the concept of an author is a notion, one that we need, but that we must also try to set aside. For if we allow this notion to be invaded by its other, by an uncontainable otherness, its specific form might be newly refigured.

A great many of the secondary sources on Lynch seek to restrict the meaning of the work to the figure of the auteur. So while several critics are captivated, for instance, by the aesthetic strategies of the work, they can pull back from any unconstrained admiration or distance themselves from any accusations of misogyny or racism levelled at the content by saying that it is all the fault of Lynch as author. This seems to me to be of limited use critically. Seeking to constrain meaning to Lynch as auteur, in whatever guise, is to limit the potential for these texts to be read alongside others, and thus allow us to refigure the archive in more productive ways.

Indeed, in thinking about a body of work in which art and film are so closely intertwined leads me on to consider the role of theory in the analyses that follow. ‘The golden age of cultural theory is long past’ Terry Eagleton (2004: 1) tells us in After Theory. And the plethora of books which celebrate this fact, or bemoan it, argue that the idea of an overarching metanarrative has disappeared. Eagleton goes on to write, in his analysis of the current state of academic thinking, ‘For the moment, however, we are still trading on the past – and this in a world which has changed dramatically since Foucault and Lacan first settled to their typewriters. What kind of fresh thinking does the new era demand?’ (Eagleton 2004: 2).

For some film studies theorists, such as David Bordwell and Noël Carroll in the ‘post-theory’ camp, the end of high theory is to be celebrated, where the straightjacket of certain orthodoxies are to be replaced by more middle-ground approaches. However, it is not so easy to dispose of what has gone before; cultural amnesia is not an easy operation, I am pleased to say. It is useful to rethink theory, what it is and what it can do, rather than to reject, wholesale, what has gone before. Martin Jay (1998: 19) points out that many of the anti-theory approaches can ‘be traced back to the classical Greek meaning of theoria as a visually determined contemplation of the world from afar’. This sense of the all-seeing, Godlike gaze of the theorist, of the scopic regime of ‘Cartesian perspectivism’ standing back from the object of study, is one that is hard to support. But, as Jay goes on to argue:

The larger point I want to make is that what we call ‘theory’ is a moment of reflexive self-distancing, a moment that subverts the self-sufficient immanence of whatever we happen to be talking about. It is precisely such internal distance that, pace certain neopragmatists, prevents even beliefs from being so seamlessly undisturbed by what are allegedly outside of them. For the very dichotomy of inside and outside is itself replicated within the seemingly immanent system of belief. As Niklas Luhmann has often argued, every system contains its own blind spots, its own paradoxical assumptions, which prevent the observer from being totally within or completely outside its boundaries. Those who yearn for an entirely immanent position are as deluded as those who think they can find one that is entirely transcendent. Their dreams of undisturbed plenitude are themselves fantasies of mastery, moves in the game of desiring control, that are ultimately as vain as those they attribute to the purveyors of theory. For absolute proximity is as