Becoming Lynch, Transforming Cinema

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Becoming Lynch,

Transforming Cinema

Julia Yudelman

Research Master Thesis

Department of Media Studies

Universiteit Van Amsterdam

Supervisor: Abe Geil

Second Reader: MarieAude Baronian

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4.1 Constructing an Architexture of Lynch’s Cinema……….42 4.2 From Coral to Cinema: Texture in/as Individuation………..44 4.3 “Feel me”: Becoming Velvet in Blue Velvet…………...48 4.4. The Skin of the Film: Towards a Dermal Texturology of Lynch………..50 4.5 The Textural Relations of Lynch………54 5. Coda: Environments of Thought……….57

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1. Inventions and Interventions:

Introducing the Cinematic Environments of David Lynch

1.1 From Auteurism to Invention to Becoming Lynch

In his book Catching the Big Fish , David Lynch tells us, “I like the feeling of discovery. I think that’s one of the great things about a continuing story: that you can go in, and go deeper and deeper and deeper. You begin to feel the mystery, and things start coming” (79). Lynch’s filmography perpetually enacts this principle. When the lights dim and the opening credits flash on screen, from Six Men Getting Sick toInland Empire , we are sucked into an overwhelming universe that rumbles with mystery, creativity, and weirdness. This powerful Lynchian cosmos is not merely an object to be seen or heard. As a process of becoming, it surrounds us and envelops us as an experience, a feeling, a flow that never stands still. As the films unfold like vast dreams, drawing us deeper and deeper into their ebbs and flows, they change form and change the possibilities of form. In the process they change us as well, touching us in ways we cannot always explain.

Rather than attempt an explanation of Lynch’s films, then, we can approach this extraordinary cinema through a different framework. What else do these continuing stories do? How do they continue not only with respect to each other, but within a larger genesis of ideas? Once we begin to engage Lynch in this broader environment, the multiple ways that this cineverse is itself a genesis comes to the fore.

Here, I draw on philosopher Gilbert Simondon’s conception of genesis as “a process of affecting the relation of human being to the world at the heart of a system. Genesis permits the resolution of tensions and conflicts because it is a succession of phases ending up in metastable states...the potentials of a system constitute its power of becoming without deterioration” (Michaud 121122). While the work of Lynch and Simondon may initially seem like an unlikely pairing, both share an affinity for such a genesis. For both Lynch and Simondon, thought enters

into this process; it does not stand apart from it, but actively contributes to “a system that contains latent potentials and harbors a certain incompatibility with itself, an incompatibility due at once to forces in tension” (Simondon, “Genesis” 300). Whether we view this system in terms

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of atoms or camera angles, tension functions commonly here as “the mark of the development of an inventive potential,” (Chabot 105) providing a rich theoretical opening that, as I will show, harbours its own potentials waiting to be explored.

Through and through, Lynch summons Simondon’s vision of the artist as inventor. The inventor does not oppose, but integrates: “he doesn’t seek to attain a specific goal, he attempts to find order and connection across the different worlds that he inhabits” (Chabot 20). In

Imagination et invention , Simondon describes how “true invention contains a leap, a power that amplifies and surpasses simple finality and the limited search for an adaption…[thus] it would be partially false to say that invention is made to obtain a goal, to realize an effect that was known in advance” (qtd. in Barthélémy 216). To put it simply, the inventor invents coherence. He or she “works to establish communication, to recover a complete universe that is not lost in a mythic past, but is projected into a still unrealized future” (Chabot 21). With regard to Lynch, we might deem such inventive coherence as that which is Lynchian: a set of relations which express a certain totality that is both singular yet limitless; a cinematic becoming that itself Lynches, whether in the form of a hot cup of coffee, Isabella Rossellini's hair, or the sound of the wind blowing through the trees at night.

The seventyyearold American filmmaker David Lynch is less fundamental to this dynamic than may first appear. Indeed, in thinking Simondon for the cinema, the question of who or what the author is opens up, and with it, new potential for studying film at large. Is the inventor an author? Maybe so, but not as classical auteur theory would have it. Largely established by the theorists of Cahiers du Cinéma in postwar France , auteur theory inducted and honored “individuals with strong (invariably masculine) personalities producing art capable of transcending its conditions of production and reception (Andrew 20).” By positing the auteur as the source or origin of a work, classical auteur theory invariably casts the author as external to the text; the individual who creates at a distance.

This is not Lynch. Beyond its elitist implications, the figure of the auteur is problematic for my purposes because it cannot account for the way that Lynch enters the continuing story himself, going “deeper and deeper and deeper” towards that which is Lynchian, never distancing

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or pulling away. Auteurism looks only to Lynch as an individual author, when the more salient aspect is the entire process of becoming Lynch that his cinema expresses.

Simondon’s conception of the inventor offers a useful corrective here—although it too only tells part of the story. Here it bears mention that Simondon’s context of writing somewhat overlapped with the auteurists of postwar France. Yet where the theorists of Cahiers heralded the individual auteur, Simondon sought out an entire process of individuation. In attempting to “grasp the entire unfolding of ontogenesis in all its variety,” Simondon argued that we must “understand the individual from the perspective of the process of individuation rather than the process of individuation by means of the individual ” (“Genesis” 300, italics in original). This project demanded “a philosophy that was supple and mobile, like the process of becoming itself; a philosophy that followed the genesis of things” (Chabot 73). As part of this project, then, Simondon’s figure of the inventor has very different implications than those of the auteur. Chief among them is a shift away from the auteur as glorified individual, and towards the inventor as a

relation within a broader process of individuation.

From a Simondonian perspective, invention does not hinge on an auteur who turns away or towards the world ; rather the inventor “ 1 establish[es] a different relationship to the world , alternative points of connections that can ultimately create new worlds for us to experience” (Kirkpatrick viii, italics in original). For Lynch, a filmmaker whose work continuously puts perception itself into crisis (Thain, “Funny”), it seems unproductive to think merely in terms of an individual with a vision or program, as auteur theory classically postulates (Andrew 23). Instead, we do better to consider how, as an inventor, Lynch is “a man of action… rather than adapt to cold water, he invents a way to boil it” (Chabot 1920). By theorizing invention as that action which is “the very essence of becoming” (Chabot 20), Simondon’s philosophy enables an understanding of the filmmaker who “does not act against the world, but is better understood as working with elements of it to establish new kinds of coherence” (Kirkpatrick ix).

Particularly when paired with Lynch, we see potential for this concept to travel even farther, and draw on a different set of artistic imaginings that both engender and build on Simondon. Conceptualizing Lynch as a “man of action” gives way to a new understanding of

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Lynch as action itself. Likewise, “establishing a different relationship to the world” becomes individuating environments of relationality—environments that remain cinematically in tension, and act as a metastable source for strange new becomings. As a figure who manages this instability or excess rather than overcoming it (Grosz 39), Lynch is an active relation in the cinematic process of individuation that I call becoming Lynch. That means Lynch is not outside the process of becoming Lynch but internal to it—an unstable element that remains in tension with the rest of the system, yet nevertheless resonates with it. In this way, thinking Lynch as cinematic genesis offers an outlet, not only for teasing out Simondon’s view of the inventor, but also for revising and retheorizing its conceptual resonance within a cinematic philosophy of individuation.

In positing Lynch as an internal relation within a thriving environment of becoming, we ultimately move beyond preliminary concepts such as the auteur and the inventor. The fact remains that, in the end, it is not essential to know who or what Lynch is. The point is, rather, the process of becoming that the films set in motion, a process which Lynch is nonetheless an inseparable part of. In this way, our continuing Lynchian story is of course a conceptual intervention, but more importantly, it is also an aperture into an alternative mode of studying cinema. By challenging our established schools of thought and how they are thought, becoming Lynch is not just another branch in institutionalized film theory—it uproots the entire tree.

1.2 Mapping out a Processual Methodology

As Emmanuel Alloa writes, “invention makes appear something that was already there but that we were incapable of seeing” (359) . As I show in the following pages, Lynch films 2 invent cinematic environments of continuous becoming by bringing to light a different way of seeing environments in general. The next chapter fleshes out this claim by looking to the seed that was already there, but that we were perhaps incapable of seeing. As I show, stirrings of cinematic environments currently exist in the burgeoning field of ecophilosophy, as well as in several areas of David Lynch Studies. Building on this theoretical groundwork, I draw Lynch

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and Simondon together to better develop a framework for thinking cinematically about ontogenesis , and ontogenically about cinema. 3

Consequently, in lieu of the individual , I foreground the process of individuation. Rather than approach films, genres, people, and ideas as separate and selfcontained, I undertake a processual methodology through which various interconnected forces interact, resonate, fall out of step, and become. In traversing this process, I visit and revisit Lynch’s cinema as a relational genesis from different perspectives. The following chapters are best regarded as individuations in this journey, as opposed to stable categories; narratives and surfaces, sounds and images, beings and becomings weave together throughout the thesis, as they do in the films.

I go on to engage the continuing story of Lynch as individuations within a larger theoretical milieu. Rather than map out each film within its own chapter, I focus more intently on the connective rhythms that reverberate through this effervescent cinema. Discussions of different films weave in and out of each other. In Chapter Two, I better ground this methodology in its theoretical context: beginning with the concept of film worlds and ending with a Simondonian framework of cinematic environments, “Environments that Lynch” argues for an ontogenic approach to Lynch’s cinema. Chapters Three and Four put this to work by individuating narrative environments and surface environments respectively. There, I seek to trace the generative action of Lynch’s filmography through both its depths and its surfaces: the secrecy, danger, and violence that permeate Lynchian narratives gives way to an affective intertwining of sound and image as texture.

As I move through these actively layered environments, I explore how we might begin to develop a Simondonian mode of film analysis that is equally Lynchian in scope. In contrast to the categorical approaches that dominate Lynch Studies, I see little value in constructing fixed categories for discussing a body of work that refuses to stagnate. Where such approaches tend to rationalize and reify—a tendency I discuss in depth in Chapter Two—my Simondoninspired methodology attempts to move with the films, in the hopes of further developing the inventive potential in such a methodology, and the tensions that invariably arise within it.

3_{A recurrent Simondonian term which JeanHughes Barthélémy explains is primarily “a synonym of individuation,}

because individuation, for Simondon, is a genesis” (219). Simondon himself argues for an expanded definition of ontogenesis as “the development of the being, or its becoming—in other words, that which makes the being develop or become, insofar as it is, as being” (“Genesis” 300).

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In this way, I also look to something in Simondon's work that the philosopher himself may not have seen. In addition to extending, appropriating, and recontextualizing Simondon's philosophy for the cinema, I also revise his vision of an inventor through Lynch as a means of exploring the (not always clear) relationship between invention and individuation. This requires a certain amount of reading Simondon against Simondon. In exploring the internal coherence between Lynch and Simondon through a praxis that is itself metastable, I do not merely conduct a Simondonian reading of Lynch. I am not interested in adding another category, methodology, or ‘ism’ to the tangled branches of the Lynch Studies tree, or the thick forest of academic film studies today. On the contrary, I am attempting to rework the way we approach both Lynch and Simondon by individuating a new system of cinematic genesis, in which the potentials of this system become without stagnation or deterioration. Not foreclosing, but generating, creating, opening up.

At some point, this project extends beyond the realm of Lynch films proper, and starts to implicate how we relate to other systems of ideas, art, and action, including those that have not yet been realized. In this sense, the films are not the be all and end all of the discussion. Although they may well be at the heart of this system, they are also a window into a larger sensibility. There, people, film, theory, and all manner of other becomings can be “Lynchian” or “Simondonian” in that they are rife with potential; energized forces in a moving process.

For now, however, let us take a brief detour into the shimmering environment of Lynch’s mind. In typical Lynchian fashion, the director writes:

To me, every film, every project, is an experiment. How do you translate this idea? How do you translate it so that it goes from an idea to a film or to a chair? You’ve got this idea, and you can see it and hear it and feel it and know it. Now, let’s say you start cutting a piece of wood and it’s just not exactly right. That makes you think more, so you can take off from that. You’re now acting and reacting. So it’s kind of an experiment to get it to feel all correct. (Catching 29)

Following this ethos, I take on the role of academic inventor by opening up a different way we can relate not only to Lynch films, but to the broader environment of cinema. Just as Lynch experiments through a series of actions and reactions, I aim to act on the films but also react to

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them. Throughout this undertaking I will draw on my own “hopeful puzzle pieces” (Lynch,

Catching 23), allowing ideas to flow in and through the films, and take on new forms in the process.

Simondon’s unique philosophy reminds us that “the inventive spirit will always be one step ahead, it will always be visionary, not in the sense where it has a totalizing vision, but because it accepted to fumble there, or nothing is gained” (Alloa 359). Likewise, in the inventive, artistic spirit of both Lynch and Simondon, I attempt an experimental analysis that does not always square—it is far from totalizating. Yet in undertaking such a vision of Lynch’s work, I accept that fumbling is part of the process. Without risks, without mistakes, nothing is gained. In the spirit of Simondon’s philosophical intuition and Lynch’s artistic experimentation, I will “feelthink” my way through (Lynch, Catching 83). I invite you to do the same.

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2. Environments that Lynch: Individuating an Ontogenic Cinema

“We emerge from the cinema not as if awakening from a darkened dream into the light of reality, but instead into an experimental night, a reenchantment of the world in the productive mystery of its potential.” (Thain, “Rabbit Ears” 91)

2.1 The World(s) of David Lynch Studies

Alongside Lynch’s oeuvre, David Lynch Studies has grown into its own field of scholarship. The edges of this field are far reaching: irony, ideology, psychoanalysis, schizoanalysis, auteurism, feminism, postmodernism, mysticism, and a host of other ‘isms’ all have carved their place within Lynch Studies . At some point, the breadth of secondary literature 4 becomes it own object of study, sometimes even outweighing Lynch’s films. Many contributions within Lynch Studies wrestle with this overdetermination, and consequently look for meaning farther and farther outside Lynch’s work, from details of Lynch’s childhood, to comparisons with other media such as painting, to religious paradigms such as Buddhism and Gnosticism. Alternatively, as seen in psychoanalytic accounts, many scholars respond in the opposite direction, by tending increasingly towards the minutiae of Lynch’s films, and searching ever deeper for that hidden layer which others have not yet found. Regardless of the specific method used, most analyses remain within an interpretive or hermeneutic approach to Lynch, driven by the goal of “trying to unearth intellectual contexts for Lynch's films that most have overlooked” (Wilson ix). Embedded in such archaeological terminology is the presupposition that meaning lies hidden beyond the surface of Lynch’s work; accessing it requires careful digging through the thick mud of Lynchian obfuscation using whatever tools necessary.

What gets lost in these hermeneutic excavations? Often, to echo Michel Chion, “a series of images, sounds, gestures, bodies and actions which must be grasped literally before any attempt at interpretation” (21). In contrast to the majority of Lynch Studies, I am not so interested in what Lynch’s films mean. This is not to denounce the intentions of the author, the deeply rooted subconscious or message of the films, or even their cultural relevance. As the

4_{For an extensive overview of the authors, titles, and topics covered under the Lynch Studies umbrella,}

see MacTaggart, Allister. The Film Paintings of David Lynch. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. 2122, as well as Wilson, Eric. The Strange World of David Lynch. New York: Continuum, 2007. x.

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scope of Lynch Studies shows, Lynch’s films offer extraordinary conclusions to be drawn in these areas. Nevertheless, that is not my project. Rather than inquire as to what the films mean , I ask a different set of questions: what do the films do?; how are they productive?; what do they

create? Asking these questions necessitates looking squarely at the films themselves.

Even so, the overdetermination of David Lynch Studies is revealing as a starting point. If nothing else, the vast range of academic discourses speaks to the films’ capacity to sustain multiple interpretations without being fixed in place. The perplexing beauty of Lynch’s work arguably lies in its refusal to be resolved. By resisting any singular reading, the films open up a large, conceptual space for critical reflection, debate, and experimentation. For this reason, it will still be worthwhile to draw on Lynch Studies for my purposes, both to reorient the discussions taking place and to forge new connections between them and the films.

Specifically, the common tendency to describe Lynch’s films in terms of “worlds” is one discourse that warrants closer consideration. Many scholars relay this idea in passing, as a somewhat offhanded way to designate the immersive character of Lynch’s work. References to “the strange world of David Lynch,” (Wilson) “Lynch’s cinematic world,” (del Río 203) or to specific films such as “the world of Eraserhead” (Yacavone 83) abound in Lynch Studies, if only to be brushed aside all too quickly. Others clarify their usage of the term, positing these worlds as emanating directly from Lynch’s mind. Discourses praising “the filmmaker’s ability to create a private world” (Goodwin 314) often coincide with quotations from Lynch himself, to the tune of “I imagined a world in which painting would be in perpetual motion” (qtd. in Chion 10). Some authors go beyond these claims, and instead see certain films corresponding to certain worlds. Lost Highway , for instance, might be characterized as “a world where time is dangerously out of control,” (Rodley xviii) or “a world characterized by paramnesia,” (Thain, “Funny”) whereas Inland Empire corresponds to a “vibratory world” (Thain, “Rabbit Ears” 100).

Other accounts delineate a more complex system of multiple worlds. Michel Chion in particular conceptualizes overarching Lynchian worlds that span across several films. Under this scheme, the attic in The Grandmother “is the first expression in Lynch's work of a parallel world, a world culminating in the Red Room of Twin Peaks …Lynch would [later] find other ways of making us enter other worlds, different from the vertical symbolism governing the world of The

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Grandmother” (Chion 18). In contrast, other perspectives identify multiple worlds coexisting in a single film. The notion of “two worlds” in particular has gained much ground in Lynch Studies: Jonathan Goodwin states that “David Lynch’s films often confront their viewers with separate realities. These separations typically correspond to conventional allegorical interpretation, such as higher worlds of good and lower worlds of evil” (309); Chion writes of “the spectator’s sense of day and night as two separate worlds, each with its own laws” in Eraserhead (54). Still other observations complicate the double worlds idea, instead describing these worldswithinafilm as interconnected and in flux. Of Eraserhead, Chion also writes that Lynch does not “establish drastic demarcations between the worlds which combine to make up the film. On the contrary, he strives to join and unify them” (42). Some Lynch scholars have even noted some characters’ ability to pass from one world to another, as seen in Inland Empire for example. Alanna Thain argues that “such movement between worlds is signaled by the use of scenes in which Dern’s characters see ‘themselves’ in other worlds; Nikki, for instance, sees herself at the readthrough after she passes through the nightclub, or on the streets of Hollywood” (“Rabbit Ears” 95). Goodwin adds that “Nikki moves from one fantasy world into another at the moment of the first one’s collapse” (317). Collectively, these discourses denote another way to conceive of Lynch’s legacy: not only as worlds of film; but also as worlds of thought.

In these worlds of thought, several patterns emerge. Following the trends of Lynch Studies more generally, many authors deploy the concept of worlds as part of an interpretive project, in which a Lynchian world essentially means something. The worlds might symbolize good and evil, for instance, or they may attest to Lynch’s role as an artist. Yet a number of theorists seem to hint at something larger in their conception of worlds, towards that which is beyond the realm of interpretation. Within these discussions, Lynch’s films do not represent the world so much as create orbecome worlds themselves. As Thain aptly notes of Inland Empire , it is a film that “doesn’t look out onto a represented world as through a window, nor reflects a world as in a mirror, but instead shows us a secret coherence of connectivity and texture” (“Rabbit Ears” 88). Daniel Yacavone agrees that Inland Empire dramatises and exemplifies “a passing out of our everyday worlds and the comfort and familiarity they entail, into the perceptually and emotionally challenging ones that a film creates” (99). Still, even the more

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ontologically oriented accounts seem to only skim the surface of the Lynchian world(s) phenomenon. Lynch’s other film worlds have largely evaded due consideration; Yacavone merely surmises that “although the worldfeeling of Inland Empire is singular, something similar to it may be found in Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997) or Mulholland Drive (2001), possibly to the extent of these worldfeelings being a different variation of the same basic expression” (100). Beyond the general agreement on their existence, there is little consensus on the nature of these filmic worlds. Questions regarding the shape, size, and texture of these worlds, their singularity or plurality, their gesticulation, movement, and interaction remain foggy.

2.2 A Film Is What a Film Does: Ecological Worlding in Lynch

The emerging fields of ecophilosophy and ecocinema can help clear the fog. While the connection between ecological frameworks and David Lynch may not be immediately apparent, it is worth considering exactly what “ecology” entails here. In the last several years, an ecological turn in the humanities has made broad strides in reclaiming the concept. Wrenched from its narrow associations with twentieth century environmental justice narratives, ecology has been reconceptualized by Félix Guattari as a mode of “transversal” thinking across material, perceptual, and social realms (135), or following Timothy Morton, as an open logic of interconnected thinking (The Ecological Thought 45).

In light of this theoretical shift, a strong contingent of cinema scholars have followed suite. We see a growing recognition that “the cinematic experience is inescapably embedded in ecological webs,” and therefore “ all films present productive ecocritical exploration” (Monani and Rust 23, italics in original). As Adrian Ivakhiv shows, the “eco” in this ecocritical exploration “does not restrict itself to the material impacts of the production of those images” (vii). Besides considering the material impact of cinema on the earth, there is also the ecocritical exploration of specific films themselves, and how they can “revivify our relationship to the world” (Ivakhiv x). The concepts and methodologies best suited to such investigation remains a matter of debate. To this end, the concept of film worlds has proven particularly relevant for several ecocinema scholars, much in the same way that the world(s) of Lynch Studies is often a common point of interest among Lynch scholars.

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Yet in contrast to much of Lynch Studies—which often deploys the notion of filmic worlds as a simple descriptor—recent ecocinema scholarship has rendered the world of the film its own developing ontology. To quote Ivakhiv, “a film is what a film does ” (12), and one of the things films do is produce worlds. Yacavone notes that since the 1970s, theorising film worlds was limited to diegetic terms. That is, it was “conceived of ‘as the fictional world of the story’ (Bordwell 1985, 16) that a film narrates, as distinct from acts or processes of narration conceived as external to it (which comprise the nondiegetic). This view equates the world quality of films solely with fictional content” (84). More recently however, increasing attention has been paid to how nondiegetic elements of a film “belong as inseparably to the world it creates and that is experienced by the viewer, as do its settings or characters” (Yacavone 84). In revising the earlier, diegetic or representationoriented theories of film worlds, a new generation of cinema philosophers have looked to the way that, between the beginning and end of a film, the entire “world of the film unfolds” (Ivakhiv 6). Moreover,

when a film works on an audience, that audience is taken to places within the world opened up by the film...Cinema, then, is a form of worldproduction or, as Heidegger called it, of poiesis , the bringing forth of a world. It is cosmomorphic: it makes, or takes the shape of, a world, a cosmos of subjects and objects, actors and situations, figures moving and the ground they move upon. (Ivakhiv 6, italics in original)

How a film “worlds” then, also raises questions of the “worldhood ( Weltlichkeit) of film,” that is, “the ways in which films construct their own worlds and in so doing assert the ontological property of film’s groundedness’—its dwelling in the totality of its construction” (Pick 21). Here, we begin to approach the sense of a palpable Lynchian totality that so many scholars have commented on: how Lynch’s films seem to produce and inhabit their own cosmos.

Yet despite the broad scope of methodologies local to Lynch Studies, such ontological frameworks of film worlding have largely bypassed the field. Rather, as noted above, they have proven germane to some branches of ecocinema scholarship. These accounts contend that how we enter or journey into the world of the film can have strong ecological repercussions for how we engage with our own world, of which the film's world is a part.

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In following a Heideggarian rendering of “world”—as “a name for beings in their entirety,” (Heidegger 67) understood within “the perspective of beingthere [ Dasein]” (Heidegger 76)—a growing contingent of theorists find ecological potential in relating Heidegger's concept of “world picture” to cinema. As Heidegger originally theorized, that we are “‘in the picture’ about something means not just that the being is placed before, represented by, us. It means rather, that it stands before us together with what belongs to and stands together with it as a system. To be ‘in the picture’ resonates with: being well informed, being equipped and prepared” (Heidegger 67).

A similar logic underpins the assertion that thinking critically about film worlds can foster a more ecological perspective of our place within a system. Ivakhiv argues that in order to understand the socioecological potentials of a film, i.e. “its capacity to speak to, shape, and challenge the sets of relations organizing the fields of materiality, sociality, and perception...we need to be able to conceive of these as being connected, openended, and dynamically in process, with ourselves implicated in the processes by which they are formed” (13). Thus the ecocinema practice of theorizing film worlds aligns itself not only with being “in the picture,” but also with changing that world picture and how we enter into it. For this reason we see a continued emphasis on films designated as progressive or forward thinking. Of particular interest is “how moving images have changed the ways we grasp and attend to the world in general,” as well as the matter of “how we might learn to make them do that better” (Ivakhiv viii, italics in original).

All this raises the question, where do the world(s) of David Lynch films fit into this ecological framework? Ivakhiv’s emphasis on bettering our engagement with the world is slippery in its vagueness; it may not be immediately clear how some films “move things in the direction of a more fluid, more animate, more processrelational understanding of the world” (26), or how those films play a productive ecological role. As Morton clarifies: living, acting, and thinking ecologically does not mean succumbing to our dominant mode of “constant machination,” in which “the injunction to get off our backsides and work now penetrates all areas of our lives” (“Dream”). Much of the conversations currently circulating around ecology and the environment too readily fall into this paralyzing mode. More than ever, “ecological data beats you down so that you are unable to move. We desperately need some wiggle room” (Morton,

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“Dream”). To live the data, then, means “you need not only to be able to act and to think, but also to hesitate, contemplate, muse, puzzle, scribble, doodle, read. To dream. We need to start dreaming” (Morton, “Dream”). Enter the fever dreams of the Lynchian universe. Ben’s Blue Velvet rendition of “In Dreams” comes to mind as eerily evocative of Lynch’s overall worlding (fig. 1). The lipsynced lines “In dreams you walk with me/In dreams you are mine” provokes the chilling uncertainty of “whose dream am I in?” (Chion 168)—a question that kindles only more dreaming.

Fig. 1. Ben performing “In Dreams” in Blue Velvet

2.3 In Response to Eco-cinema: An Archaeology of Worlds

The ontological framework of worlding proposed by ecocinema thinkers, then, can offer some useful tools for exploring how Lynch films indeed function as cinematic microcosms. At the same time, this decidedly ecophilosophical take on cinema leaves some important questions unanswered. Ivakhiv’s theoretical framework is valuable as an ecology of cinema at large; it investigates how “as we watch a movie, we are drawn into a certain experience, a relational experience involving us with the world of a film” (12). But if Lynch Studies has proven anything, it is that Lynch’s films supersede any one theoretical paradigm; what may be productive for analyzing film in general may not be fully adequate for thinking Lynch specifically. The concept of worlding is certainly useful as a starting point, but how can we make sense of the uniquely twisted way that Lynch films world?

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Upon closer consideration, “worlds” may be an insufficient qualifier of Lynch’s work. Since the inception of Umwelt theory in the 1930s, “world” as an existential concept has struggled with lasting implications of a contained, fixed structure. Paved largely by German biologist and philosopher Jakob von Uexküll, the burgeoning theory of Umwelten [literally translated as “surrounding worlds” (Pollmann 778)] initially held that

there is no common world, for every species (and potentially every individual) perceives the world differently and, as a result, lives in a world that is different from that of other living beings… each species or individual is surrounded by a subjective world dependent upon the respective organism’s capacities for action and perception… These individual

Umweltbubbles envelop every plant, animal, and human like an outer shell or extended body, while simultaneously isolating and separating each entity existentially into quasi monadic units. (Pollmann 778)

By conceiving of the biological world as a series of subjective, soap bubbleesque Umwelten,

Uexküll’s ideas marked a stark departure from the determinism inherent to nineteenth century milieu theory (Pollmann 792). A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans quickly proved inspirational to a new generation of philosophers, among them Martin Heidegger . 5

At the same time, the imperfections inherent to Uexküll’s framework persisted as well. Because Umwelt theory relied on the false premise that the environment is generally stable (Tønnessen 48), it could not account for environmental transformation. Consequently it left open the question, “how was such a change of Umwelten—that is, a change of physiological properties and/or sensorial capacities that resulted in a different subjective world—possible, and what sorts of environments, means, or technologies facilitated such shifts?” (Pollmann 781). Heidegger’s revision of Uexküll’s work sustained this theoretical issue of fixed existential boundaries. Specifically, the notion that every animal is bound to its stable Umwelt proved useful for Heidegger, who in turn used Uexküll’s biology to develop the distinction “between beings that simply ‘live’ and those that have what [Heidegger] called ‘existence’ ( Dasein ). He ascribed to humans the capacity for ‘worldforming,’ while animals are ‘poor in world’ ( weltarm ), and

5_{For a strong analysis of}_Umwelt_{theory postUexküll, as well as a more detailed reading of the continuity}

between Uexküll and Heidegger, see Pollmann, Inga. “Invisible Worlds, Visible: Uexküll’s Umwelt, Film, and Film Theory.” Critical Inquiry 39.4 (2013): pp. 791797.

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nonorganic things, such as stones, are ‘worldless’ ( weltlos )” (Pollmann 797). In this way, Heidegger continued to apply essentialized, unchanging boundaries to his conceptualization of “world,” even if those boundaries no longer corresponded to those of Uexküll’s subjective

Umwelten.

In drawing on Heidegger, ecocinema scholars’ rendering of film worlds continues to contend with such exclusionary principles. Although keen to invoke the concept in a more open, ecological way than his predecessors, Ivakhiv still grapples with the principle of containment that “world” embodies. To be a world, he writes, something “must have structural dimensions holding it in place” (6). Even when we are “taken places” by the film’s world, that world remains necessarily finite, and disclosed between the boundaries of the opening and final credits (Ivakhiv 6). Moreover, adopting Heidegger’s framework to ecocinema leads to its own set of restrictions: Anat Pick argues that, like animals for Heidegger, most films are “manifestly poor in world” (21); Ivakhiv concedes that even though the subjectobject continuum opens up in “every moment of cinematic worldmaking,” it can also “be remade in every instant. Alternatively, it is one that can be fixed and strengthened over the course of a film and, subsequently, over the course of countless films, genres, and traditions of moviemaking and viewing” (10). Apparently some film worlds are more closed than others.

Despite its existential grandeur, “world” as a concept—from Uexküll to ecocinema—grapples with its own boundaries: what is inside the world versus outside, and whose world is it? Which worlds are worthwhile for scholarly investigation? Somewhere along the way, we lose the intricate yet vast connectivity that is so integral to the Lynch filmography as a whole. A large part of what makes these films necessarily Lynchian is that which unifies them, rather than compartmentalizes them. Seemingly minute details such as the ominous swish of a velvet curtain, the harrowing ring of a lone rotary phone (fig. 2), or the befuddled skepticism of Jack Nance’s facial expressions are so compelling because they haunt virtually every film, drawing them together but also twisting and distorting them in unique ways. On a more macro level we can look to the “abstract cosmic murmur” (Chion 52) that is Lynch’s oceanic sound design from Eraserhead toMulholland Drive ; or the same atmosphere of imminent danger that permeates Fred and Renee’s apartment in Lost Highway , Jeremy Irons’ abandoned film set in

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Inland Empire , and the woods of Twin Peaks . Through it all there is a powerful sense, not of fixed containment, but of constant becoming. “It’s something that is like a magnet to go back in there,” (Lynch, “Interview”) Lynch has said of his work. A useful analogy, we can think of how a magnet, like Lynch’s films, works through forces : constantly attracting and repelling bits of matter and ideas, and taking on new form in the process.

Fig. 2. An unexplained phone call in Mulholland Drive; one of many throughout Lynch’s films

The point of exploring these dynamic connections across films then, is not to fit them squarely into some original, fixed world of Lynch. Rather, I am interested in doing precisely the opposite: thinking through how change happens in the films, and what it produces. That means taking the fever dream at face value; grabbing the bull by the horns, and holding on for the ride. Even though it is tempting to refer to Lynch’s films as worlds, the fact remains that we run into tremendous difficulty when we attempt to encapsulate Lynch, even if it is as vast an encapsulation as “world” denotes. Doing so fails to account for how that Lynchian tangibility, that which is so uniquely Lynchian, travels across films. The dream work of Lynch, to recall

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Morton’s “Dream” argument, lies in the resonant connections between films, not in their isolation and containment. And in those dreams, virtually anything is possible.

2.4 Across Films, Across Worlds: Cinematic Environments

In thinking through these negotiations, a new concept arises that is immanent to film worlds, yet still offers something new, waiting to be explored: cinematic environments. Surprisingly, virtually nothing has been written about the concept of cinematic environments proper. Yet with regard to Lynch specifically, a theoretical framework of environments in cinema can offer immense potential for thinking through the relational character of these shadowy film worlds. Put differently, the notion of environment can provide a useful corrective to the implications of fixed existence that underpins the film world model by instead looking to how Lynch films form a complex moving system.

To put it simply, worlds take place somewhere. For Lynch’s pulsating worlds, however, that somewhere is not a place so much as an environment of unfolding action. Significantly, the concept of environment that I invoke here is best understood within an ontogenic framework rather than an ontological one.

Gilbert Simondon’s influential theory of individuation provides an excellent basis for this notion. As a philosophy of processes and forces rather than principles, Simondon’s revolves around the central idea that the individual, whether organic or inorganic, “is not a substance, but the result of a process of individuation” (Chabot 74). Rather than focusing on the already constituted individual, Simondon argues we must first look to the “preindividual forces [that] preexist and make possible the emergence of individuality, those forces which are actualized in the individual” (Grosz 38). These fundamentally dynamic preindividual forces also constitute the metastable milieu within which individuation occurs, a key component in Simondon’s framework. For an individual to come into being, “there must be an environment [ un milieu ] for it, a state that is metastable, surcharged, at a boiling point... and then suddenly, there is a taking of form” (FagotLargeault 143). Yet significantly, the process does not stop there, “since individuation does not exhaust in the single act of its appearance all the potentials embedded in the preindividual state” (Simondon, “Genesis” 300). The milieu continues to rumble with these potentials, thus providing “the ongoing virtualities with which the individual must engage”

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(Grosz 38). In this way, the individual is always more than itself, “for it is an individual with the ongoing potential to undergo further changes after it is constituted as such” (Grosz 38). Just as in Lynch, nothing is stable. Every close up, every glance, every telephone ring is somehow always more than itself, resonating strongly with the potential for becoming something different.

Seen as the “reservoir of becoming,” (Chabot 86) the Simondonian milieu is a wellsuited analogy for how I view the cinematic environments of Lynch: “a generative and creative potency…a vitality that is still untamed, a pure nature, a physis , a natura naturans ” (Chabot 86). As such this environment is characterized by an inherent tension in force (Simondon, “Genesis” 317). Like Lynchian atmospheres of intense dread and mounting pressure—when Jeffrey hides in Dorothy Vallens’ closet in Blue Velvet, for instance, or when Bobby Peru slides his hand up Lula’s skirt in Wild at Heart , or when Henry’s baby unfurls from its bandaged prison (fig. 3) in

Eraserhead—the Simondonian milieu “generates forces which act upon each other, which generate tensions, points of excess, the development of a tipping point or form of emergence, forms of becoming that coexist at best uneasily. These points of instability are the sites around which individuality may emerge” (Grosz 39). Thus although this process may be tempestuous or even violent, always “falling out of step with itself [ se déphaser ]” (Simondon, “Genesis” 301), there is also an inherent creativity present here. For Simondon, tension is “the mark of the development of an inventive potential” (Chabot 105).

Fig. 3. The Eraserhead baby breaking through its bandages

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Likewise, it is the uneasy tension so characteristic of Lynch films which enables something new to develop, whether an affective response, a change in the miseenscène, or a plot twist. Lynch describes his own creative process as follows:

I get ideas in fragments I always say. It’s as if, in the other room, there’s a puzzle. All the pieces are together. But in my room, they just flip one piece at a time into me. The first piece I get is just a fragment of the whole puzzle, but I fall in love with this fragment. And I love this fragment, and it holds a promise for more. And I keep it… And then I say having the fragment is more bait on the hook. And it pulls in more. (Lynch, “Interview”)

Lynch uses Blue Velvet as an example. He explains that one day, upon listening to Bobby Vinton’s version of “Blue Velvet,” “something started coming from this song. And what came from the song at first was red lips at night in a car. And green lawns with some dew in night. And then the next thing that came was a severed ear in the grass” (Lynch, “Interview”). With respect to Simondon’s theory of individuation, Lynch’s figurative puzzle is useful as a loose metaphor. The point is not how the pieces fit together perfectly (the complete puzzle is off in another room, inaccessible to us), but the process of puzzling: how individual fragments of a larger whole spontaneously emerge; how they “hold a promise for more” and thus contain inherent creative potential, through relating to each other and to the larger whole; and the shapes that take form within that relationality. It is a tense, rocky process—most pieces will not fit together—but nevertheless a creative one, as new structures take form. Significantly, these individuations or puzzle pieces do not just lead to more individuations; they also individuate within, and as part of, an environment that is already brimming with the mysterious potential for severed ears, red lips, and grass dew, among all manner of other possible individuations. It is a Lynchian totality, but more importantly, a totality that is constantly in motion, transforming itself, falling out of step with itself to create something indeterminate, but nevertheless new.

In terms of analyzing the films themselves, this perspective has two important ramifications. Firstly, it enables an analytical framework in which diegetic and nondiegetic elements exist on the same plane. People, places, objects, sounds, textures, and so on all constitute pieces of a larger whole, as simmering individuations within an active milieu of

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preindividual forces. Secondly, theorizing Lynch films within a framework of individuation helps show the error in conceptualizing the films as though moving linearly towards a resolved end point, with Lynch steering at the helm. On the contrary, the films are always in a process of becoming—becoming Lynch. Chabot explains that for Simondon, “the relation has the value of being...the relation does not connect A and B once they have already been constituted. It is operative from the start. It is interior to their being...no substance can exist or acquire determinate properties without relations to other substances and to a specific milieu” (Chabot 77). Within the cinema of Lynch, that means individuations or puzzle pieces are not part of a linear process, but born of a larger, active environment of Lynchian potential. For Lynch himself, those individuations might be Bobby Vinton, a severed ear, and red lips, but for us that “bait on the hook” could just as well be the camera panning down to reveal roses, or Kyle MacLachlan hiding in a closet, or the shimmer of Isabella Rossellini’s blue velvet dress on stage. Regardless, all are made of the same star stuff, as eruptive takings of form due to the metastability of an environment that was always already saturated with Lynchian weirdness, and the potential for becomings.

Thus although it may seem as if Blue Velvet represents two different worlds of light and dark (Chion 84) for instance, Simondon’s theory shows that the two could never be separated in the first place. Amidst the green grass swarms a terrifying cacophony of insects; Dorothy Vallens’ suffering is as much a part of “Blue Velvet” as Bobby Vinton’s soft croon; the garishness of Lumberton surfaces again in the Man in the Yellow Suit. All are part of the broader cinematic environment of the film, or even multiple films. It is this same common environment that suggests the velvet in Blue Velvet might be ultimately the same velvet as in the Red Room of

Twin Peaks , or that the blazing match sticks in Wild at Heart may have something to do with the fire that consumes Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me . As Chabot reminds us, “individuation is a general framework. It allows for infinite arrangements...Individuation is a way of telling the story of life. It is a projective test, in which everyone sees what they want to see” (94). Therefore, there are no wrong connections, as “to exist is to be connected” (Chabot 77). In this way, just as it remains unproductive to delineate some definitive world in which all Lynch films squarely fit, there is little value in accessing the complete puzzle in the other room.

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The value, rather, lies in the process of each puzzle piece individuating within a milieu, and the new forms that emerge in this process. The cinematic environment of Lynch then, is the existential ground on which this ongoing process of individuation takes place.

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3. The Continuing Story of Lynch’s Narrative Environments:

Secret Individuations and Dangerous Milieux

“One is first of all struck by a certain violence in the films and, second, by the fact that it resembles nothing else and works according to no logic we have ever encountered.” (Chion 14)

3.1 Entering Lynch’s Narrative Environments

“This oil is an opening to a gateway,” the Log Lady proclaims, clutching her log closely to her chest. Special Agent Dale Cooper turns the glass bottle in his hands, his eyes glimmering as he inspects the opaque black liquid. “Intriguing, isn’t it?” Cooper takes a whiff of the oil, then passes the bottle to Sheriff Harry Truman. “Scorched engine oil!” exclaims Sheriff Truman. Cooper wastes no time moving forward: “Hawk, bring in Ronnette Pulaski.” Ronnette arrives. One sniff of the engine oil and she starts convulsing in fear. “The night Laura Palmer was killed,” she mewls softly.

When Cooper and Truman reach the circle of Sycamore trees deep in the woods of Twin Peaks, the tone darkens. Cooper appears as a deer in headlights before growling slowly and uncharacteristically, “Harry, I must go on alone.” Despite Sheriff Truman’s imploring, Cooper removes the flashlight from his hands, trudging alone into the darkness. As Truman watches on from the bushes, Cooper approaches a wall of crimson curtains that has just appeared before him, swaying ominously. He knows his expartnerturnedvillain, Windom Earle, waits for him on the other side. Cooper enters an opening; the fabric fades away.

It is the final episode of Twin Peaks ’ second season, aptly titled “Beyond Life and Death.” Defiantly reviving Laura Palmer’s murder after a streak of meandering plot lines, “Beyond Life and Death” marks Lynch’s return to the director role after a hiatus of fourteen episodes. It shows. A very Lynchian patchwork of tense comedy, elusive mystery, and devastating horror weaves throughout the episode, creating a charged narrative environment and a reservoir for strange new becomings. Consequently, the finale of Twin Peaks stands as the climax of the entire series, and the boiling point of a strange universe that has been stewing for twenty nine episodes.

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From a Simondonian perspective, “Beyond Life and Death” is particularly relevant due to its sustained focus on the Red Room, an “eternal waiting room outside time and space enclosed by its red drapes” (Chion 101). Keeping with the Log Lady’s insight, the Red Room scenes provide an opening within the narrative becoming of Twin Peaks , as well as a window into theorizing the enigmatic individuation of Lynch films more generally. Beginning with an analysis of the Red Room visàvis the ontogenic process of crystallization, this chapter explores the stakes of conceptualizing Lynch’s narrative environments as metastable milieux charged with potentials for becomings. Specifically, I consider the Red Room as a metastable narrative milieu, and the individuation of Cooper/BOB as a temporary resolution within that metastable environment—a process that evokes Simondon’s paradigm of crystallization.

I also consider the limits of this paradigm. Building on the final moments of “Beyond Life and Death,” I go on to discuss how secrets travel, taking Mulholland Drive as a case study of when these Lynchian individuations exceed the terms of crystallization. Unlike the relatively simple individuation of a crystal within its metastable solution, the narrative individuation of secrets is considerably more idiosyncratic. In Lynch, secrets take on a life of their own. By consistently taking on new form, they open up strange, amorphous spaces in the narrative that brim with dangerous potential. Rather than exhaust that potential, however, these quasiliving becomings continue to resonate and draw from their dangerous surroundings. Borrowing from Simondon’s framework for living beings, I argue that in Lynch’s cinema secrets do not resolve metastability so much as perpetuate it. By propagating and even feeding on unfolding milieux of danger, secrets enacts a Lynchian theatre of individuation. In this way, the individuation of secrets and their dangerous milieux are mutually constitutive relations in the overall activity of narrative movement. Ultimately I conclude that in Lynch, secrets are best conceptualized as becomings in a generative process of secrecy.

3.2 “The dweller on the threshold”: Crystallization in the Red Room

First, however, let us return to “Beyond Life and Death.” For ten hours, Cooper remains lost in the folds of the Red Room, as this surreptitious milieu gradually transforms from uncanny to terrifying. Nothing is what it seems in this amorphous waiting room. As Cooper passes

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through infinite hallways, he encounters Laura, who becomes the elderly Great Northern concierge, who in turn becomes the Giant. The quiet agitation of the jagged floor tiles, backwards speech, and creeping camera work quickly escalates to fullscale violence. A gulf of roaring flames encroaches the miseenscène. Lights begin to flash across Cooper’s face as The Man From Another Place cackles maniacally, like an animal in heat. Laura appears again, eyes clouded over, wordlessly screaming and writhing towards the camera (fig. 4). Cooper stumbles through yet another hallway, this time trailing blood. He finds his lover(s) Caroline/Annie and himself lying half dead on the floor. In desperation, Coop accepts Windom Earle’s offer: exchange his soul for Annie’s life. Windom starts to remove the soul via a stab wound when BOB suddenly infiltrates the scene, snatching Windom by his collar. “He can’t ask for your soul. I will take his,” BOB roars, but he apparently takes both. Windom Earle bursts into flames, Cooper staggers backward. The following moments exceed any sense of narrative (en)closure, as the mounting tension rapidly comes to a head: a cacophony of hysterical howling overwhelms the soundtrack; a second Cooper, eyes foggy and white, bounds after the first Cooper; the lights strobe violently, amplifying the chaos; the second Cooper catches up to the first Cooper, grabbing him; BOB emerges in extreme close up, blurry and out of focus, his beastly laughter swallowing the scene whole.

Fig. 4. Laura Palmer in the Red Room of Twin Peaks

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When Coop finally wakes up in his hotel room at the Great Northern, something is wrong. “I need to brush my teeth,” he states flatly, greeting the concerned Doc Hayward and Sheriff Truman with a cold, penetrating stare. “I need to brush my teeth,” Cooper says again, quieter but also more menacingly this time. “Good idea,” Truman ventures. He and Doc Hayward exchange nervous glances as Cooper enters the bathroom sideways, as if drunk with irritability. Behind the closed door, Cooper glowers before the mirror, and slowly squeezes a tube of toothpaste into the sink. A close up exposes that the twinkle has left Cooper’s eye, leaving in its wake a hard, unfeeling darkness. Suddenly, Cooper’s head rushes forward, smashing against the mirror. A colossal shattering reveals BOB’s face, laughing and bleeding on the other side of the glass: a mirror image of Cooper, and the becoming of the new entity that is Cooper/BOB (fig. 5).

Fig. 5. The becoming of Cooper/BOB in Twin Peaks

As the central paradigm for Simondon’s theory of individuation (Chabot 81), the process of crystallization offers some key tools for conceptualizing the unfolding action of this infamous

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scene. Summarized as a sudden taking of form within a metastable state, crystallization refers to “the moment when the nucleus of the crystal takes form; at a given place a form appears and then it propagates… the form in question takes on a depth it did not have before and this is truly an invention which, to a certain extent, simplifies by putting in order something that was once disparate and chaotic” (FagotLargeault 143). Significantly, the milieu in which a crystal first forms is amorphous, meaning its molecules are in “an unstable, disordered state, lacking, above all, the periodic order which determines the geometry of the crystal” (Chabot 84). Nevertheless, the milieu is rife with chaotic energy; in order for crystallization to occur, this amorphous, preindividual milieu must be metastable, surcharged, at boiling point (FagotLargeault 143). The appearance of a germ, that is, a “foreign body or shock to the system” then initiates the process of crystallization, providing energy and transmitting a structure to the milieu that it did not previously have (Chabot 8384). Simondon asserts that “the appearance of a germ in the amorphous metastable fluid is ‘spontaneous, and to date inexplicable’” (qtd. in Chabot 83). The point is not what the germ is, but the process it sets in motion.

In “Beyond Life and Death,” that process is particularly horrifying. To begin to think cinematically, we can look to the amorphous scene of the Red Room as a filmic milieu boiling over with tension. Laura’s bloodcurdling screams, the camera’s endless anticipation of hallways and curtains, the unnerving sway of the jazz soundtrack: all constitute mounting preindividual forces which supersaturate the Red Room, and precede the individuation of Cooper/BOB. Within this framework, the final shock to the system, the germ that ultimately gives way to the “crystallization” of Cooper/BOB may well be the shattering of Cooper’s hotel mirror: it is the final blow of Cooper’s head against the glass that solidifies his becoming BOB; the point of no return for both his character and the narrative. The episode, and indeed the series as a whole, takes on a sudden depth, a terrifying new structure, that no one could have predicted.

The Red Room thus engages in a kind of narrative individuation that is notably akin to crystallization. For Simondon, theorizing crystallization moves beyond a division of form and matter, and instead allows us to grasp “that activity which is at the very boundary of the crystal in the process of formation. Such an individuation is not to be thought of as the meeting of a previous form and matter existing as already constituted and separate terms, but a resolution