OOJ #11:
1821 words; 9-minute read time
This is the first part in a three-part series where I’ll be publishing an abridged version of my BA dissertation: The Problem of Language in the Feature Films of David Lynch. An accompanying video essay and podcast will be released in OOJ #12.
Talking — It’s Real Dangerous
‘The thing that language never is, never can be, but to which language is always moving.’ — Steve McCaffery
Since the very beginning of his filmmaking career, David Lynch has exhibited a fundamental distrust of, and reluctance to engage with, language.
Dennis Lim explains in his 2015 book David Lynch: The Man from Another Place that Lynch has always resisted the demands of press and critics alike to put the meanings, motivations, and processes of his films into words, pointing to this classic clip as evidence:
Lynch has suffered a fraught relationship with language for far longer than he’s been a filmmaker; Lim cites Lynch’s ‘“pre-verbal” years, a phase that lasted well into his early twenties.
This is a habit that has continued throughout his career; even his largest productions were marketed using ‘the most minimal one liners’; Mulholland Drive’s poster labels it ‘a love story in the city of dreams’, and Inland Empire is supposedly nothing more than the story of ‘a woman in trouble’.
Lynch did describe to Lim how he believes it inhibits the filmmaking process:
‘As soon as you put things in words, no one ever sees the film the same way […] and that’s what I hate, you know. Talking – it’s real dangerous’
But why does Lynch feel so strongly about language, why does he deploy it in such a self-consciously strange and enigmatic way in his movies?
Psychocriticism
Following a precedent set by critics like Todd McGowan and Slavoj Zizek, this essay examines Lynch’s films from a psychoanalytical point of view.
Take Lacan’s topological model of the psyche — the Borromean Knot. It consists of three closely related ‘orders’ — the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real.
All three of these orders are interlinked, holding each other and all of us in a delicate psychological balance; if any one part were to be removed or severed, the knot would fall apart, and all three orders would be set free in disconnection.
The first section of this essay focuses on the Symbolic order, because the Symbolic is ‘about language and narrative’, it is all that comprises the ‘social world of linguistic communication.’
The Symbolic, through language, is…
‘the pact which links […] subjects together in one action, human action [is] founded on the existence of the world of the symbol’.
Not only does Lynch present a knowingly weird idea of the Symbolic, but he attempts to negate, disrupt, and repurpose it.
The second order of importance will be the Real.
‘The Real is the impossible’ according to Lacan; all that the Symbolic and Imaginary orders — those which constitute conscious reality — cannot represent.
Mark Fisher summarises it most succinctly and usefully:
‘The Real is an unrepresentable X, a traumatic void that can only be glimpsed at in the fractures and inconsistencies in the field of apparent reality.’
What Fisher highlights so pithily here, and what will become central to the argument of this essay, is the ‘desubstantialised’ nature of the Real, its ‘negativity’.
Zizek explains that the Real is not…
‘An external thing that resists being caught in the symbolic network [but a] fissure in the Symbolic network itself’.
The third order, the Imaginary, is ‘the domain of images.’
It corresponds to the mirror stage of childhood development, wherein a child ‘misrecognises in its mirror image a stable, coherent whole self […] in order to compensate for its sense of lack or loss.’
Lynch identifies a crack present in the Symbolic order. Namely, that language, the Symbolic, is given an almost totalising power to define the self, and the self within the social field…
Even though it is, by nature, incapable of representing an essential and universal part of the human experience and psyche — all that exists within the Real.
An Anthem Of Conformity
Despite its fundamental inadequacy language is universally perceived as the utmost definitive authority.
1968’s The Alphabet, one of Lynch’s earliest short films, depicts the violent effects of an ‘intellectual discourse for rationalisation and structure’ through language.
The Alphabet depicts a child whose sleep is tormented by a relentless recitation of the alphabet that invades their previously peaceful dreams.
Grace Lee describes how the letters appear:
‘Secreted onto the screen through ruptured openings, [they] creep and spread like an infection before entering the head of the human figure, causing it to bleed and disintegrate.’
It is not just the letters themselves Lynch believes invoke the suffering; it is their ‘ceremonial delivery’, the ‘threatening chants like an anthem of conformity.’
Note also the booming adult voice that sings scales and arpeggios; far more enthused by the structuring elements of the words they sing, the organising form of language, rather than the words themselves or any meaning therein.
All this reflects Lynch’s concern with the ways in which language is dogmatically taught and codified; that the process of learning language is inherently violent.
The violence of the Symbolic comes through its rigid linguistic structures, locking unknowing individuals into social pacts that may keep society stable but depend on an outright denial of everything ‘Real’ in order to maintain that stability.
A Cry And A Name
Eraserhead is the perfect case study of this.
By introducing an entity that cannot be assimilated into the Symbolic through language, and thus cannot enter into the contracts upon which the social space is built, Lynch shows how essential the authority of the Symbolic to define individuals within social reality has become.
Critic Hedwig Schall describes how…
‘A man’s story begins with language, a cry and a name [and when] the newborn is immediately addressed and categorised in words as a boy or a girl […] these two moments of naming and castrating constitute the subject’.
A concern with naming can be seen throughout Eraserhead. The first line of dialogue that occurs is when Henry’s neighbour and later lover leans out of the apartment to ask ‘Are you Henry?’
Similarly, the first piece of text that the camera exposes is his name, ‘Henry Spencer’, stuck onto his mailbox.
By stark contrast, the baby in Eraserhead refuses to be differentiated.
When Mary, the reluctant mother, tells Henry that ‘[the hospital] still aren’t sure if it’s a baby’ at all, her choice of words is telling: the family are unable to differentiate the baby because they cannot define ‘it’ as male, female, or anything else.
What makes the baby so terrifying to its parents throughout Eraserhead is that it continues to cry, it constantly alerts them to its presence, its ‘being there’, but that it cannot be differentiated and so becomes a fissure through which the Real might be glimpsed.
It is this prolonged threat of the Real, brought about by language’s inability to differentiate the baby, that causes the film's climatic act of infanticide wherein Henry plugs the gap through which the Real could enter.
The result of this prolonged exposure to a ‘Real’ object is a pervasive silence in almost every other aspect of the film.
A pervasive silence inhabits the marital home – neither adult ever utters more than a few words to the other apart from the occasional outbursts of suppressed, confused rage.
The opening sequence of the film anticipates the child’s birth: absorbed in absolute silence, other than the ominous sound of wind that blows in the background, Henry’s head floats horizontally across the frame, he opens his mouth as if to scream but no sound escapes; he has become ‘arhetorical’.
England’s Most Unfortunate Sons
Lynch’s second feature The Elephant Man is similar to Eraserhead in that it presents a character who resists easy linguistic definition and assimilation into the Symbolic.
Unlike the baby in Eraserhead who is eventually destroyed for destabilising the Symbolic, John Merrick is able to socially interpellate himself and become assimilated into social reality thanks to his interactions with various texts.
After initially failing to impress the Hospital Administrator, Carr Gomm, with his awkward and mechanical repetition of biblical lines taught to him by Dr Frederick Treves, Car Gomm concludes that Merrick ‘doesn’t belong here’.
However, when Merrick is overheard reciting the 23rd Psalm — sections that Treves had not practised with him beforehand — Carr Gomm not only allows him to stay at the hospital but he is moved into a more comfortable set of rooms in the main wards.
On being visited by Mrs Kendall, one of London’s foremost actresses, who gifts him a copy of Shakespeare’s Complete Works, Merrick and Kendall recite a passage of Romeo and Juliet. When they finish Kendall says to him:
‘Oh Mr Merrick, you’re not an elephant-man at all, you’re Romeo’.
The text serves not only to transform Merrick from pariah into social subject, but furthers the interpellative effect by elevating him to the realm of so-called high art.
When the Governing Committee of the hospital convene to vote on whether Merrick should be permanently admitted to the hospital, the meeting is interrupted by a visit from ‘her royal highness Alexandrea’.
The princess reads a letter from Queen Victoria wherein Merrick, whom had been described immediately before the meeting by committee members as an ‘abomination of nature’, is interpellated for a final time and transformed into ‘one of England’s most unfortunate sons’.
A Hymn To Unreality
In 2001’s Mulholland Drive, a budding actress played by Naomi Watts is transformed from a naïf into a serious sexual subject.
Her character and her ‘flimsy comic-book moniker’ — Betty — are, according to George Toles:
‘So entrenched in naivete and the hokey paraphernalia of small-townness that her whole confected being is a hymn to unreality.’
However, when Betty attends an audition and begins reading her script a kind of ‘alchemy’ takes place, wherein she suddenly transforms into a character whose ‘hold on life and on her turbulent inner forces seems more fraught with consequence than our own.’
Through textual interaction, she is transformed from something alien and unreal into something ‘concrete’, something that ‘exists’, through language.
By having Betty enact a desire that is communicated and sustained through the language of the Symbolic via a script — a written text that belongs to the realm of the Imaginary — Lynch shows that language can reassert its own authority and distance subjects from the Real by acting as a mechanism for the reproduction of desire.
All these scenes represent Lynch’s identification of this problem, but they also provide the seeds of a possible solution:
If language is the foremost route away from the Real, then it must also represent a possible route back to it.
The motif of performance exhibited in these scenes — Merrick’s recitations and Betty’s audition — hints towards the key behind Lynch’s destabilising of the Symbolic:
Self-consciously uncanny language deployed in self-consciously performative spaces.
[Full Bibliography Will Be Published In Part 3]