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On Lynchian Perversity

Eraserhead is a perfect exposition of Lynchian pornography. What "mystery" is there other than where, in the proletarian nightmare of the film, is the bourgeoisie hidden and how? The answer being precisely that the bourgeoisie has secured its throne on—and from—the other side of the screen. The sublime irony that Marxists are barred even from dignified analysis, never mind from actuality, by their rejection of Idealism serves as a perfect blueprint here. Those who mock Plato's claim that light is emitted from the eyes would be perfectly justified were it not for a single omitted detail: unlike Lynch cultists, Plato is not an imbecile. Just as the body of "labor" is proactively traversed from the top-down by the bourgeoisie as it unilaterally labors the proletariat into being, the filmic proletariat in Eraserhead is cut open by Lynch's directorial—paternal—authority. Both cases do away with whatever metaphors one might make between them; perhaps the relation between form (Platonic or otherwise) and content is nothing but narcissism. It is Idealism which has rejected, or dejected, Marxists into a being whose actuality is identical with the filmic garbage dump that is Eraserhead. The monstrous baby is the fundamental Lynchian anti-metaphor: creation as excretion. The monstrosity of the baby, film, and proletariat allows the cast, director, and bourgeoisie to appear as dignified—or, more properly speaking, to disappear as the supreme authority into a Royal distance. Lynch is the pornographer of the bourgeoisie itself, of the very ambiguity of the "of": the veritably subhuman spectacle of Eraserhead is its unnerving display of "form penetrating content", the total passivity of the father is exactly the total "passivity", the total security in and of immutable authority, of the director, just as it is that of the bourgeoisie. Can the filmic rabble prying at Henry's virginal Royalty, his puffy cheeks, his wet eyes, his eccentric hair, be distinguished from the actual rabble prying at Lynch's directorial authority, emanating from behind almost identical features—ironically, getting further and further away from what is under their noses? Formally, Eraserhead and the rest of his filmography are nothing but an obscene disclosure that this is exactly how the bourgeois Subject exiles the proletarian Object. Suffice to say that, other than Mulholland Drive, any one of his films lends itself to much more analysis than all of them combined deserve. I will only provide the bare minimum, and derisively at that. Eraserhead is also a perfect exposition of the primal—and only—fear of the Father/director/bourgeois, henceforth referred to as "the bourgeois Subject": FEAR OF LOSING PRIVILEGE. Lynch's whole body of work is haunted by the dysgenic vista, by the constant infiltration of and/or collapse into undesirability—including, and especially, of a formal collapse into legibility, of losing his status of genius; the genius of status itself. Apropos of the insufferably pompous psycho-drama accompanying this film, indeed, the director's distress is very much integral to the film: binding and murdering the monstrous baby is a ritual against dysgenic abjection, against the collapse into baby/film/proletariat, it is the expulsion of "the proletarian Object". Does the opening shot itself not subsume the Lynchian filmography and pornography? Americans who worship Lynch and claim that his films are distilled "Americana" are wrongly correct, so to speak. Contrary to all appearances, this very shot is the genesis of America itself: the hero of the bourgeois Subject and the villain of the proletarian Object floating in a void. America, in the grossly Phenomenal sense, is nothing but the subsequent unfolding of Eraserhead, nothing but the separation of hero from villain by an erection of a "spatiotemporal" body between them. That actual American globalism can be best described as directorial, and the world in turn described as a studio, is as unsurprising as the fact that Lynch has an explicitly paternal relation to his cultists. That the barely concealed pornography he leaves for them to find is a mirror, conversely, is as surprising as the fact that it is the Royals, not the rebels, that have constituted America. The film's peculiar architecture is precisely the frontier of the industry or the industry of the frontier. Whereto the industry? To the frontier, of course. Whereto the frontier? To the industry, of course. Hollywood is in California for good reason: the occult event of traversing the frontier by industrial means grants Americans the power to industrially project the frontier back at the whole world—England's throne is no match for the director's chair. The filmic operation is a Royally industrial maneuver enforcing a frontier, the camera lens, in front of which abject beings are directed—illuminated by an eye. Even the title is nothing but mockery: the deliberate mixture of social realism with Lynchian parlor tricks is a "hermeneutic" confession that all the functions supposedly liberated by America, in this case production and sex, have been liberated—from—America, dumped back into the Old World. Are the disgusting golems of Eraserhead trapped in the veritably European claustration of nothing but production and sex—which are scandalously purported as primeval, both in the film and in general—not as one "anamorphic" end which grants an other end precisely "anti-anamorphic" powers, the power to disappear...and to designate? That the title resonates with a filmic instance of the most banal labor which nevertheless appears, narratively (formally), as a parlor trick indicates that the whole "division of labor" is an occult Royal ritual of the division—from—labor: the golems are doubly labored and doubly sexed by Lynch, who thereby grants himself unlabored and unsexed occult paternal power whereby he can designate this very filmic operation. Apropos of paternal, is The Elephant Man not the spiritual successor of Eraserhead? Making abstraction of the biographical aspect, what does the film itself show? It is masterfully obscene, or obscenely masterful, to explicitly place the film in Europe but totally conceal the fact that it is a film about Europe. Who or what is John if not the monstrous baby that was supposed to die? The relation between the baby, Henry, and the rest of the cast is all but identical with that between John, Frederick, and the rest of the cast. Biography is as much of a red herring here as "surrealism" is in the previous film. The Elephant Man is as the attempted exorcism of the failed murder of the monstrous baby: Eraserhead collapses into "surrealism"—or spectacle—proper right after the failed murder, is The Elephant Man not a sanitized retelling of this second part of the film? The film deploys a Dialectical freak show of observer-observed, however, it is the Dialectic itself which constitutes the prominent Lynchian parlor trick. The claim that the applause of the theatrical climax "symbolizes" the Old World applauding the monstrous American that is John is not exactly wrong (at least not when considering the many other previous allusions to this), or is wrongly wrong, so to speak. It is only wrong insofar as it still invokes a pre-American, pre-Lynchian, topology. Rather, the impossibility of expelling the proletarian Object forces the bourgeois Subject to stretch itself into a Klein bottle whereby IT, rather than the Object, disappears. Do the excrescent mass of the baby and the excrescent mass of John not constitute "one surface", exactly in the Kleinean sense? That is to say, this topological "suture", of making two surfaces into one surface, not unlike America "revealing the world to itself", is actually the ultimate topological "lesion": the directorial intent of the bourgeois Subject is thereby freed to ever-circulate in and of the one surface, culminating in it thus being able to "truthfully" deny its presence therein. Apropos of Lynch's constant reference to magic, filmic or otherwise, is the vessel not the alchemical object par excellence? The Kleinean binding and loosing surpasses whatever substantial operations would have occurred therein, not unlike the Lynchian "style" occulting the filmic substance. Of course, Lynch—most likely—did not "mean" any of this. Do pornographic actors "mean" their genitals? Do the fathers of the monstrous baby and of John "mean" their corporeality? What exactly is the substance of status, and its genius, if not this very Kleinean body? It is not so much that the Subject was on one surface and the Object on the other (perhaps the Subject has secluded itself in one imaginary end of Kleinean circulation while dumping the Object in "the other"...the only "symbolic" act?) but that the Subjective seclusion is orthogonal: the Eraserhead-The Elephant Man filmic body itself constitutes the dysgenic vista, one that is no longer between Subject and Object, but between Object and the abjection of its indefinite sickness or unreality—the Subject being precisely "behind" this plane, behind, or beyond, the screen. Eraserhead shows the failure of the pre-American, pre-Lynchian, Subjectivity of a European eugenic-dysgenic bodily operation, of the distinction of surfaces. The Elephant Man shows the "trans-genic" filmic operation of the bourgeois Subject going beyond the proletarian Object, leaving it reeling in a literally "dys-genic" state, a Kleinean impasse "between" the "bad" itself and the "offspring" itself, between sickness and unreality. Moreover, the Subjective directorial maneuver returns with a proactive vengeance to the Object, the "trans-genic" abjection is ran through by a "trans-Kleinean"...projection. Even in the Historical sense, "class consciousness" only appeared in the—demonically ironic—Material sense, once it became possible for a single American to watch the spectacle from across the Atlantic screen. Strictly speaking, there has never been such a thing as an American bourgeoisie, an American proletariat, an American Capitalism, an American Marxism—there has never even been an American Economy! Rather, there has only ever been an American cinema, one that runs the whole world through and forces it "back" onto the American projection screen, and one that was always already inscribed into any and all Political and Technological endeavors—subtract their common denominator of visual venality and nothing remains. There is little to no Philosophy here. Can the projection screen be said to have a second surface? Who is "behind" the American film reel through which the whole world sees itself forever collapsing into the same perverse bilaterality? Lynch is the only director whose work is "about" nothing else than his unimpeachable authority to make his work as such—the only American director. At the slightest criticism, does Lynch not invoke the primordial accusation made against the indigenous and the slaves: "you don't get it"? Indeed, could the American production have appeared as anything but a Lynchian cacophony to any of them, one through which the bourgeois Subject alludes to its disappearance? No more than industry could have fathomed that Hollywood is its final destination. Or, indeed, no more than anyone could have fathomed that the final theater performance in The Elephant Man is a perfect microcosm of Lynchain visual antics, or that the final freak show likewise prefigures the "black lodge". Apropos of impossible foreboding, is Dune not the first Twin Peaks episode? Despite the film's volume erupting in bloated self-satisfaction, there is very little to say about it. A pastiche of Old World architecture, as if the whole world was visible from the Californian coast, foreshortened such that all empty spaces in all architectural forms were filled by other forms; as if contempt was a building material. A formal density that is only matched by the equally formal (Kleinean) inanity of space: the "Newtonian" class relations which animate the film are so alien to America that they might as well be in literal—and fictional—space. Perhaps this is why the novel, written by an American, is considered as arcane as it is "unfilmable" by other Americans? Suffice to say that "Paul is Lynch" is too primitive a claim even for this film. Rather, what is remarkable is who and what is not Lynch—and how. Although the film is already haunted by the, now archetypically Lynchian, dysgenic villains and strangers, this is only a red herring. It is not so much that there is a dysgenic exception threatening Paul's Royal journey, but that Paul's journey constitutes the only exception to a dysgenic totality. Recall that every character but Paul is explicitly Other, either by being undignified or suffering an indignity: his father loses a tooth, his mother is pregnant, his sister is preternatural, a balding man, a tattooed man, an old man, etc. Paul's indignities, however, are explicitly not real. That, indeed, the box is the film itself—excruciating unreality—is always already accounted for by the water of life being the screen itself—the bar past which only Paul can see and, moreover, from beyond which he now Royally directs Arrakis...and the film itself. That Lynch disowned THIS film is not even ironic, rather, it turns the actual world, the Old World, into the (proletarian) Object of irony. There is no metaphor here. Film supersedes reality exactly as meritocracy does: whoever has directed the Objectivity of labor has simultaneously directed the "labor of the Objective", has relegated labor to, and as, the vacuous and cretinous form of the Object, and has rightfully (rightfully! there is no irony HERE) secured the Royal throne from beyond which he can relish the treasure of remarking this demonic irony. Paul's dreams are a much better triangulation of Lynch's position. Indeed, the treasury of bourgeois Subjectivity is precisely the oneiric—the terminus of the Lynchian filmography, in and of Twin Peaks. Would all eyes turn to California should filmic production cease? Quite the contrary...DON'T YOU LOOK AT ME! That the closing shot of Blue Velvet likens Dorothy's robe to the sky, the nightmare of the barring tapestry to the waking liberation, is most troublesome. The Kleinean body of dreaming lets the nightmare itself wake up, it is the sky that becomes the robe—in dreams you're mine all the time! Incidentally, apropos of absent fathers, there is a vulgar footnote regarding Jeffrey's identity: the many similarities (even diegetic ones) between him and Frank come to a head in the final murder—does the camera going into Donald's ear and out of Jeffrey's not allude to Jeffrey being grafted onto the object of paternal filmic impetus, that the film happens in his head, so to speak, that he is now the closet wherein Frank lurks, inverting, or Kleining, Subject-Object, phallus-yoni, reality-film, etc.? It is no coincidence that this sounds extremely pagan (amputation-reintegration, etc.), Christianity proper (Christocentric Gnosticism) alone resists filmic delirium, so much so that "all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them" would have to be fabricated had they not been real—moreover, perhaps it is the fabrication itself that constitutes the supreme temptation? The deafening silence of the absence of Christianity in general in Lynch's filmography cannot be overstated. Of course, it might be case that its absence lends itself to the loftiest "structural analysis" but suffice to say that there is a veritably Lynchian counter-Reformation whereby the celluloid itself is projected as sacramental—terminal occultism. Many Protestant Americans rightly despair and remark that "America is a Christian Nation" only insofar as it is always attempting a Lynchian exorcism of Jesus Christ himself. Regardless, the extremely vulgar analysis about the film's supposed "surface" and "depth" can nevertheless be of some use. Instead of asking what the "depth" reveals about the "surface", one should ask what the "surface" reveals about the "depth". Is the film's title not a strange euphemism? Apropos of dreams sanitizing reality, is the "depth" not sanitized by the "surface"? Who or what are Frank and the gang? Hypersexuality at the cost of unpardonable deviance, hysteria, toxicomania, street smarts, tireless bodily animation, most of all a penchant for "antics", for being "uppity"—the answer is as obvious as the genre of music accompanying their arrival at Ben's apartment. The film's "deep" title is Black Skin. Does the pretense of "pre-Oedipal" Freudian nonsense about "absent fathers" not therefore collapse into bitter actuality? A masterstroke of bigotry! So distasteful that it is almost imperceptible, a "pornogony" which turns the viewer into the (proletarian) Object of pornography. As perverse as Frank's tears. Apropos of bitter actuality, many Lynch cultists are confused about the final triumphant return of the idyllic suburbia. What was the pornographic display of the "depth" for? Or rather, where is the pornography? What "surface"? What "depth"? Even Lynch deserves better. Having swallowed the "pornography", the final suburbia "returns" as the true depth: the film's end can now be connected to its beginning, however, this is not the tiresome cut-seam, rather, the surface of the initial suburbia is no more. Indeed, looking awry at the bar itself, the "inter-Continental" fetish object between end and beginning, makes something very curious show through: nothing at all. That is to say, the bar is the "spatiotemporal" body of the film itself, orthogonally, one end of the bar being the end of the film and the other its beginning. It is tremendously ironic that the Continental bar was proudly stripped of all topological dignity—not unlike Dorothy—only to reveal itself as Hollywood property. Moreover, property itself is the ultimate, and ultimately pornographic, thesis of the film: the whole world wrapped in the blue robe of a "maternal" property which "precedes what it owns", this being disclosed from a privacy the likes of which rightly makes Marx a Lynchian village idiot. Is the shot of Jeffrey and Sandy kissing in a crime scene while surrounded by police not the true depth and destination of the joy ride? Power and desire unduly touch each other just as the end and the beginning of the film do—the only contradiction worthy of being called Material and one that "paradoxically" goes nowhere. Value is not extracted and withheld from anyone (this is absurd), rather, everyone is proactively withheld AS value, indefinitely withheld as nothing but themselves. Perhaps this is why all Continentals are so hysterical about America? Even Historically speaking, nowhere else is the occult formula of LIFE = VALUE (which upends the whole Continental edifice) as pornographically disclosed. Moreover, does Lynch not present insufferably particular interiors of private residences, insufferably self-satisfied Subjects and their insufferably venal conspiracies, insufferably eccentric filmic form—DESIRE—as the very throne of his own filmic genius—of POWER? Blue Velvet is also the primal scene and completion of Lynchian vulgarity, the dysgenic parade finds its "triadic" counterparts of misogyny and class horror. However, this is not as bad as it seems. It is worse. Of course, there is an obvious "Material" reading of his filmography as Marxist class horror, which culminates in Bob being nothing but "bare proletariat" invading a bourgeois space, but things are not so simple. Apropos of Power and desire, perhaps Wild at Heart, an ostensibly pedestrian, "regressive", film, discloses the mechanisms of class horror and misogyny in a most unexpected—strangely Lynchian—way. The motif of identity and its ambiguity, as obsessive as it is boring (and as literally narcissistic in film as it is in reality, film and reality likewise looking at "each other" like Narcissus), which defines his subsequent films is, most surprisingly, already present here. Sailor and Bobby...are they the one and the same? Perhaps it is impossible to notice that everything between Marietta, Marcellus, Johnnie, Mr. Reindeer, and Bobby is said and done by wistful gazes, half-smiles, swooning, caressing, whispering, etc., as impossible as it is to realize the grave relevance of the witching theme, which rightly makes Freud a Lynchian village idiot. What is Bobby but the final destination of Sailor's criminal journey? Recall that the latter was a driver for the Fortune crime family and the former is one of their hitmen. Does Sailor driving to California not therefore lend the Lynchian highway shot its most perverse surrealism, that of being a literally real? Lynch's critics are, sadly, as hopeless as his cultists—to accuse him of inane surrealism (i.e. the triviality of "it was all a dream") absolutely misses the point, rather, what makes his films abominable is what they unduly introduce to, and as, reality itself; secretly designating Sailor as Bobby, for example. When Bobby assault Lula, the mirror in the room reflects him just as it reflects Sailor later that day. The two also appear together in Marietta's crystal womb, the occult Power leading her back to Lula—what distinguishes the abhorrent magnetism of desire from the abhorrent magnetism of Power? Precisely what distinguishes Sailor from Bobby. Does the film show Sailor "waking up" to his criminality and realizing that he is Bobby? Or, watching it in reverse, does it show Bobby slipping into a "dream" which sanitizes his criminality? Yes. That everything after the final bank robbery could be regarded as Bobby's "death dream" (does the America it shows, categorically different from the previous one, not resemble his teeth?) is as uncanny as the fact that everything prior to Sailor's arrival in Big Tuna could be regarded as his "repressed birth trauma memories". Recall that Lula initiates conversation with Bobby before Sailor does, and tells Sailor that she is pregnant later that night—"pregnant with Bobby". Does this curious and unique instance of initiative, of an otherwise not even infantile but deliberately subhuman character (unsurprisingly, also a woman), not allude to birth? Moreover, does it not allude to the vertiginous—Kleainean—structure of Power-desire, momentarily laid bare in birth? Quite the "primal scene". That Sailor's encounter with the "good witch" and his final realization of love are facilitated by a veritable gang initiation is as unsurprising as the orgy of Johnnie's murder. The film also betrays another Lynchian motif: is his neurotic fear of the police not akin to Marietta's neurotic fear of Sailor? The police is a strange clinamen of Power, a straying from desire, just as Sailor is a strange clinamen of desire, a straying from Power. It is no coincidence that a policeman's yielding to desire is what ultimately brings Sailor back into the fold—or the "unfold": the final musical performance completing his journey to the Californian screen, the fourth wall breaking the viewers. In this sense, Lula can even be said to be Marietta's top agent. It is very difficult to identity what exactly distinguishes Lynch's misogyny from normal misogyny. Even in the most vulgar films (Horror or Lars von Trier's), the misogyny, no matter how exuberant, always allows for a minuscule condemnation of the misogynists through a similarly minuscule remainder of the women's dignity. Not so with Lynch. His women are furniture, they disappear into the scenery, in fact, can one not finally call the iconic Lynchian color palette what it actually is—feminine? However, this is not a world shimmering with the "Yin" of a dispersed femininity, the romantic "Nature", quite the contrary, "Nature" itself is nothing but an identical—and continuous—filmic designation. Even Historically speaking, "Nature" only became infantile, cretinous, virginal—only became Lula—on the television screen, and for a Lynchian production, no less. Sailor-Bobby traverse Marietta's prosthesis of Lula's body just as humans are said, no doubt derisively, to traverse "human nature" in and of female topology, wherein and whereby Power and desire always find and complete each other. Moreover, Lynch knows exactly how misogynistic his films are. Recall the striking contrast between Sailor telling Lula about one of his instances of casual sex and Lula telling Sailor about her cousin Dell. The former flashback is bright, vital, clean, a Royal portrait of sex, while the latter flashback is dark, moribund, filthy, the sexless Dell threatening the very Lynchian tone of the film. Incidentally, does Lynch imagine Dell's pathology to be the cause of, or punishment for, asexuality? Marietta sends Lula to catch Sailor just as much as she sends Sailor to catch Lula—is Lula's flashback not her only instance of humanity, as if a single memory, a single possibility, a single allusion to asexuality makes the dual relation (there is even a woman accompanying Dell in the flashback itself) rotten, threatening the candy-colored sexed Lula just as much as it threatens the very body of the film—is there even a distinction? Lula is gripped by Marietta precisely for her sexuality, not for her virginity, which "paradoxically" momentarily showed through when she was alone with Sailor. They are both equally necessary for the crime (of) family. Apropos of gripping one's own prosthesis, Lynch turns his empty pockets inside-out in Lost Highway. Even though the film has been rightly deemed inqualifiable, is this enough? A man and a woman (who else?) living in Lynch's house (where else?) receive tapes (what else?) of the house. They watch the tapes of the house in the house. The man, who looks like a bootlegged Lynch, has a dream (what else?) about himself and his wife in the house. A man dressed in black. A woman dressed in black. Man walks into darkness. Woman gazes in the mirror. Man gazes in the mirror. Woman gazes into darkness and calls man. Man walks out of darkness and obscures the camera lens, the darkness then cuts to the darkness of a television screen...onto which the latest tape appears, showing murder (what else?), to complement the previous sex (what else?). Perhaps this is the only thing edified by Marilyn Manson's existence? This straight-to-video garbage must have exasperated Lynch just as much as it exasperates the viewer. Ironically, abstaining from analysis and simply "experiencing" the film, as Lynch cultists mandate, yields abysmal results: the Fred-Pete pivot is purported as a masterstroke of filmic irreverence, however, is it not simultaneously bog-standard "Materialism", Lynch almost explicitly conceding that the Fred act is junk and having to resort to the most primitive maneuver of switching to the Pete act for no reason other than it being non-Fred? Does this excuse the film in any way? Quite the contrary, the "meaning" of the film is precisely the mockery of a much-needed mea culpa (even in 1997): instead of plunging the dignified and dignifying object of legibility into his heart, he plunges a colonoscopic camera into his "lost highway". Apropos of the MTV soundtrack, does Lynch's straining self-reference not resemble something, indeed, characteristically American? The whole film is one punchy Dr. Dre beat away from an Eminem music video. Forced rhymes about toxicosexscapades so surreal that they warp reality and kill the haters—and the women—resemble filmic depictions thereof so much so that it becomes hard to tell whose nasal yapping it is. One cannot, unfortunately, cut critique of this disgrace short (as one should, lest one commits an identically Lynchian crime) without mentioning the painfully transparent identity of the Mystery Man. He is the only one who knows that Fred, the bootlegged Lynch, is hiding as Pete...an embodiment of legibility as mysterious as Dick's name. Apropos of hiding, The Straight Story is just as Lynchian as the aforementioned films. The absence of any Power-desire, any Kleinean antics, any American bigotry marks not so much the absence of Lynch's authorship and his surrender to biographical rigor, but what is paradoxically his most surreal film—a display of an America without Lynch. The lack of a sexual couple, naturally, dooms the filmic world to senescence, mental disability, poverty, etc., as if everything was imbibed with Lynchian contempt and reproach of the highest order. Just as the world cannot exist without America, America cannot exist without Lynch. This hypothetical existence without his consent condemns it to the worst depths of the Lynchian repertoire: a torpor worse than anything in the "black lodge", a high noon worse than any overexposure, an alogia worse than any of his extremely primitive dialogue; a body as compromised as the one in the other "biographical" film. Of course, this is where one must avoid the trap of conceding that Lynch is therefore the sublime doctor of the American soul—quite the contrary: America is itself always already Lynchian in the almost literal sense, there is absolutely nothing for Lynch to reveal or critique, just as there is nothing about Lynch that America can rebuke, his filmography is only a narcissistic vista whereby both parties can pretend to be someone else. Apropos of the double and all of its occult implications, after the miracle of Mulholland Drive, a film as gallant as the others are abominable—one that definitely owes its existence to a series of events nothing short of Lynchian—does Inland Empire consist of anything but Lynchian antics coming back with a vengeance? Acting out for two, so to speak. Shaking the camera like a rattle (perhaps the tambourine song was not so random?), animal costumes, screeching strings, jump scares, special effects as subtle and as necessary as excrement smeared on the screen from the other side; this is a pre-verbal temper tantrum. Perhaps defense of this film is in short supply since the utmost secret thesis woven into this labyrinthine fugue is "I am a bad director"? Although it does lend itself to some legibility, the janitorial endeavor of "connecting the dots" is precisely what one must never do. Rather, one should take the film at face value and plumb what is above the surface, traversing the same distance that one would have traversed down the latrines and landfills of "depth", for an insight not dissimilar to their usual contents, and instead strike at what is hidden in plain sight. The woman crying in front of the television screen, the Lynchian ideal, filmic or otherwise, later says something so simple that it is almost impossible to notice: "SINFUL DREAM"! Obviously, dreams are the Lynchian-American Holy of Holies and, almost as obviously, an Eastern European, the frontier of the Lynchian dysgenic vista, is Ontologically condemning the great dream. Again, whether any of this is "intentional" or not is irrelevant. Just as there is a Laura Dern beyond the question of whether it is Nikki or Sue in this shot or that shot, there is a film beyond, or above, the question of whether any of it is "conscious" or "unconscious". For example, one could say that finally depicting Europe itself as the final object of horror and hatred makes this the necessary end of Lynchian filmography, or that, indeed, even the Polish side being absolutely devoid of Christanity guarantees—far more than any explicit statements—that Lynch has a psychotic fear thereof. Who intrudes on the set during Nikki and Devon's initial rehearsal? Of course, it is later shown to be one of Laura Dern's characters. The "deep" question would be which one it is, while the lofty question is of a different order. Making abstraction of Mulholland Drive, all of Lynch's women could be said to be finally rebuking him through Dern during the "confession" scene (the deliberate ambiguity of her character therein suggests as much), however, recall that Lynch himself has shot most of Inland Empire with his own hand, so she is "in reality" saying it all to Lynch, who is probably across the table: a nauseating form-content confusion whereby the very looking away from the screen constitutes the foundation of that which one looks away from. The rehearsal scene contains a shot from the vantage point of the intruder, without revealing his identity, only for the scene to later repeat, this time beginning with an intruding vantage point, only for the intruder to be shown as a Dern character—it is not so much that "the Phantom is Lynch" but that Dern herself is a hypnotic device, so to speak, the Nikki-Sue revolving door by which Lynch exits the film. An observer-observed freak show reflecting The Elephant Man and, indeed, a final monstrosity looping back to Eraserhead. This would qualify as a brilliant directorial maneuver of formal return were it not for the simple fact that, just as there is no movement from Eraserhead to The Elephant Man, Lynch's subsequent filmography is frozen inside the very Kleinean body circumscribed by the two films; there is nowhere to return from. Apropos of infertility, filmic or otherwise, Lynchian misogyny is, conversely, brilliant for the same reason: Inland Empire can be described as being "about" nothing else than Lynch's abuse of Laura Dern's appearance, a seamless continuation of womanhood itself being "about" nothing but being designated—abused—a woman by the very "reality" which thereby disappears into serial (reproductive) "objectivity". Of course, the psycho-drama can be said to vacuously circulate between Nikki and Sue, just as "real" reproduction can be said to circulate between man and woman, however, the many formal—filmic—interstices, which belong to Lynch alone, are themselves what circumscribe the desecration of Dern's image, said interstices, much like the fracture lines which mark the feminine body, constituting the film itself, exactly as said fracture lines constitute womanhood. Is the Historical practice of passing women from their fathers to their husbands anything but the two males using the woman's body as a prosthesis to have "Metaphysical" homosexual intercourse and, moreover, the woman's appearance as an uncannily filmic object to disappear the intercourse? For example, it is all but impossible to notice that the Dern character in the "confession" scene speaks of a removed eye and a castration, terminal paganism, as impossible as it is to notice that the scene is a "confession" in the first place; the viewer is instead relegated to the fool's errand of identity (is it Nikki or Sue?), just as he is otherwise relegated to the question of "his own" identity in "reality". This is all laid bare in the most vulgar way by Lynch himself: in the scene wherein a Dern character kisses the crying woman before vanishing, the latter is then shown from the former's vantage point—recall that it is most likely Lynch himself who is standing there in Dern's place to film the shot. A form-content incest as abysmal as the fourth wall being ostensibly broken by a Dern character's "soul" floating above her body and seeing the hitherto invisible camera from behind, only for it to be revealed that it is the camera of Kingsley Stewart, the diegetic director of the diegetic film. That the crying woman finally escapes from her television cell into a house previously shown as part of a diegetic set should not beguile one into believing any Continental nonsense about the strife of actuality, changing the past, the big screen defeating the small screen, etc. It is simply that salvation is depicted as a Lynch film...inside a Lynch film. Of course, this coincidence of dreaming and salvific—bourgeois—Subjectivity is far more explicitly made in Twin Peaks, Lynchian ground zero. Let us briefly recall the Lynchian triad of dysgenic parade-misogyny-class horror. As many have noted, it is very difficult to have anything to say about Twin Peaks, however, this is neither due to its volume nor to its eccentricity (both of which are overrated, and coincide in a kind of implosive narcissistic repetition, regardless). Rather, said triad is simply stripped of all ostensibly redeeming elements, approaching a "bare bigotry" which is, unsurprisingly, indistinguishable from a "bare America". Class horror, for example, is depicted at least "poetically" in all the other films. The Lynchian motif of depicting poor spaces as "aboriginal" nightmares of total confusion and rich spaces as trumpets of final revelation reaches its abhorrent climax in Twin Peaks. In Eraserhead, his first film, rightly deemed his most surreal (at least in the classic sense), the poor space is the whole film, naturally. In The Elephant Man, there is an analogous formal trick, the rich space is simply a literal rich space in the classic, pre-American, sense, which strangely enough seems to erase the initial dungeons and cages from long-term memory, to say nothing of the final theater—indeed, the Kleinean body has little to do with analysis and is nothing but filmic. In Dune, the poor space belongs to the Fremen troglodytes, the rich space being more or less the rest of the film floating above them; poverty is deemed secondary, pathological, bug-like. In Blue Velvet, the poor space is Ben's apartment, a cauldron of too many transgressions to list, down to gender-bending (Ben is more than a little feminine), while the rich space is the final rejuvenation of 1950s suburbia. In Wild at Heart, Marietta and Mr. Reindeer constantly provide grounding from their temples to prevent the film itself from settling in Big Tuna, which is as Ontologically offensive as it is poor. In Lost Highway, the rich space of Dick fills up any narrative holes—poverty itself!—between Fred and Pete. In The Straight Story, there might be an oblique instantiation of the spaces but, nevertheless, does the film not begin with an aerial shot of a combine harvester, a formal wealth consisting of the (now veritably prehistoric) Old World industrialism being transfigured into "imaginary"—American—wealth? Theoretically, money is made every time this shot is played, moreover, piracy does not end the profit, quite the contrary: undue images—not unlike dreams—must have been the very primeval "Material conditions necessary" for the "discovery of America". In fact, the "real" people who sow and reap the very filmic field are most likely doing it on account of an image not dissimilar from The Straight Story itself, just as their "real" ancestors most likely came to America on account of an occult image not dissimilar from this very shot. The film even closes with a shot of a literal poor space—perhaps a warning that the (forced) referents of occult images are, likewise, hidden in plain sight. Even Mulholland Drive, which deserves no criticism proper, confirms the rule. The final party dispels what is canonically considered the dream act, which, although not poor, is emanated by or attempts to redeem the events arranged in the poor diner by two poor people. In Twin Peaks, however, this kind of analysis falls flat. It is simply that the rich space is Cooper himself, the bourgeois Subject, and the poor space is everything not Cooper, the cretinous "thermodynamics" of the proletarian Object(s). Suffice to say that even attempting to analyze the countless threads of Twin Peaks is the very labor that would guarantee one's residence therein, and one's abject reliance on Lynch's Divine Epistemological mandate, exactly as the filmic population relies on Cooper's identical mandate. In the most formal sense, what, where, or when exactly is Twin Peaks? A hideous auto-Orientalism wherein the sitcom itself is depicted as not only always already indigenous, but imbued with all the exoticism of the pre-American "Metaphysical" wilderness—and a hypothetical pre-American "reality" proper—a veritably Edenic space, Paleolithic preterritorialization, Disney cartoons made flesh, the best advertisement to date of America as such, moreover, the closest thing to proof of the hypothesis that, indeed, the category of Truth itself cannot be separated from an American originalism. Whether Bob is Leland or vice versa makes little to no difference, the Adamic bourgeoisie of Cooper binds and/or looses him just the same. Recall that Mike and Bob initially "explain themselves" in Cooper's dream (it would be Bob's first appearance were it not for the previous shot of him in the Palmer household in the same episode), already upending the end of the second season, and, moreover, Bob is shown in a literal industrial nightmare—a perfect anti-metaphor, a disclosure of the labor-murder coincidence, and, simultaneously, no doubt an illustration of the Lynchian fear of legibility: that the work of understanding promises death mandates the cretinism of Twin Peaks. It could even be said that Bob himself is the main, and possibly the only, citizen saved by Cooper's Subjectivity. It is as if all other Lynchian villains do not know that they are dead, not unlike the Historical European proletariat, hence the characteristic atmosphere of the filmography, dripping with a nameless agitation. Fortunately, America gives the proletariat its first and last job of Object, the show impossibly mirroring this by inverting the usual Lynchian hierarchy of dreams, making Twin Peaks the perennial dream and the nightmare of Bob a mere relegation to (or of) an obsolete reality. Indeed, there is no Philosophizing here: "You may think I've gone insane. But I promise I will kill again.", does this line not perfectly subsume all the actual tragicomical Leftist figures peddling the prophecy of revolution today, from an equally filmic industrial background, no less? Is the sublime maneuver of the show not this very merciful act of letting Bob know that he is a dumb Object (he even disposes of Cooper's only enemy) and putting him to rest, thus letting the "pre-Oedipal" utopia of Twin Peaks bloom? What can Bob be said to leer at if not Twin Peaks exactly as the viewer himself sees it? He appears as a kind of visual laugh track, a ghostly token of grounding from a position as derisive as that of the Object in the most vulgar sense, allowing the show's rosy cheeks and adolescent vigor to indefinitely play so as long as the "necessary Material", or necessarily Material, conditions of expulsion of Objects is met. Of course, watching the show in reverse rather distastefully "confirms" all of this, per the usual form-content incest...but this is not remarkable. Conversely, the Sphinx of Laura does guard something quite surprising. Apropos of the show's vulgar food fixation and, indeed, Lynch's strange fixation with base actions having magical resonances, it is almost impossible to notice that the women of Twin Peaks are the most exceptional women of the Lynchian filmography—they are unsullied by his insane misogyny and are simply allowed to be normal; this is very much integral to the surreal normality of the show. Even Shelly only suffers normal domestic violence, rather than loss of personhood in the usual cauldron of Lynchian filth. Formally speaking, Laura's murder has no "meaning" other than the very base act of a dead woman mostly satisfying the occult Lynchian appetite for feminine misery and allowing the Twin Peaks women a strange respite, as if they are radiating with his own afterglow. That this seems and, indeed, is for all intents and purposes magical makes Lynch more, not less, misogynistic. Just as the ultimate space of bourgeois Subjectivity, the oneiric, being revealed as empty, at the expense of the proletarian Object being excreted as full, does not make the former any less rich or the latter any less poor, quite the contrary—there is an anti-Hegelian inversion of the interdependence itself, such that their modes of appearance to each other cannot be anything but...Lynchian. Reality looks back at itself whenever Twin Peaks is playing just as Cooper's veritably Eucharistic enculturation eventually humanizes the town by dispersing his Subjectivity such that he can only be said to be investigating himself (perhaps the cogency of the actual FBI is cogent even for the FBI in exactly the same manner?). Apropos of Lynchian humor, the irony that Cooper thus possesses the rest of the cast, and that this unearths the "meaning" of the final shot of the second season, is tragically lost on Lynch cultists. As is the admittedly masterful perversity of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. Of course, there is a dubious analysis that a dead woman is the entry point to the onanistic hero's journey of the "Metaphysical" male that is Cooper, who is so good at nothing but being himself that he even resurrects her in the apotheosis of Subjectivity that is his oneiric treasury—being for two, so to speak, thus making the woman Ontologically obsolete. Needless to say, this falls short of Lynchian abjection. The bourgeois Subject only "finishes" misogyny in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me: the "enigma" of the dead Laura is only matched by the "enigma" of the living Laura in that her filmic resurrection is the punchline to what is perhaps the ultimate Lynchian joke. Formally, the cut from the first act, which already resembles the show "too much", to the second act, which—is—the show, is a supremely narcissistic maneuver. The usual Lynchian "surreal" cut, one between two seemingly unrelated scenes, is now over-Lynchian, the film free falls into malignant self-resemblance. The second act is, formally, a punchline, one coextensive with its purportedly somber content, not unlike Laura's life therein being coextensive with the worst Lynchian misogyny. The show concluding with two Coopers and the film having no Coopers is, no doubt, a bone for the Continentals. I, too, shall perform one charitable act and omit the third season from this critique.

#david lynch #baudrillard #jean baudrillard

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litdump · 11 months

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Zhuang Zhou vs. Ian Paisley: On the Absolute Complicity Between Power and Irreverence

What is the relation between irreverence and Power? Perhaps the Zhuangzi inadvertently provides a skeleton key—the reader’s dream of laughing at Power? Power’s laughter of dreaming the reader? An unspeakable taboo, a forbidden chiasmus, is put, no doubt derisively, under the reader’s nose. “Zhou and a butterfly—surely there is a division”. The phrase following the famous affirmation of ambiguity in the butterfly dream passage is, conversely, sacred. That even grammar itself seems to resist the chiasmus is very telling. Divisively, there is certainty? Not quite. The phrase is unutterable proper, precisely because it betrays the secret of certainty and the secret of division, which is that their secrets are one and the same. A Continental’s pretense of not being orientalist? An orientalist’s pretense of not being Continental? The butterfly, of course, in strict—Mathematical—opposition to its “poetic” allusions, is absolutely necessary here: is the incestuous secret not akin to the Devil’s Tuning Fork in that the Geometric body is coherent not despite but precisely because of its division? Likewise, is the same secret not akin to the oneiric “spatiotemporal” body? Finally, are the Fork and the dream not akin to the Continental Symbolic and Imaginary (it is totally irrelevant which is which), themselves writhing into being on either side of the incestuous body of the Continental Real—the literal bodily “metamorphosis” of the butterfly? There is another forbidden chiasmus which, of course, totally colludes with the first one, the second sacred phrase of “things changing”. That, indeed, “change thinging” is unutterable for the “other” reason, for simply being synonymous with base Materialism (i.e. “motion producing”) is nothing short of Demonic. Just as Demonic as literal butterflies changing precisely into living fodder for the same caterpillars: the butterfly eggs shed the butterfly’s body just as the butterfly’s body sheds the pupal case—even Biologically speaking, this abominable “spatiotemporal” body can be indefinitely traversed from one end to the other…“Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched”. Conversely, Ian Paisley says:

Last of all, let us note the content of what it says. It says “it is the Blood of sprinkling.” Those are wonderful words “the Blood of sprinkling.” There are three great instances in which the Blood was sprinkled. Go back to the Passover night. The Israelites were told to take the basin of the shed blood. They were told to take hyssop and sprinkle the blood upon the lintel and the sideposts of the door, the entrance to the house. There is a word used there that is used nowhere else about the blood. It does not say “sprinkled,” although it was sprinkled. It says, “Strike the doorpost!” “Strike the lintel!” Thank God that is what the Blood of Jesus did for me. It struck the lintels of the posts of Heaven. It struck the doorposts of glory. When it struck them, the door opened for me, and praise God, I walked in sheltered under the Blood of the Lamb. I believe there is Striking Power in the Precious Blood of Christ. What a day when the Blood struck your heart, brother. What a day that was, when God saved us by His Son’s Blood.

In contrast to the Continental-orientalist metamorphosis (commonly known as Catholicism), Calvinists cannot help but affirm the most dangerous Gnosticism—a catastrophic waking—precisely because they take orthodoxy, rather than irreverence, to the end. Catholic logorrhea about the “meaning” of the blood puts the literal and the figurative in a Zhuangzian relation, that is to say, it constitutes the IRREVERENCE OF POWER. The Catholic claims the murderous actuality of the blood to be a premise for an all but literal joke (milk, menstrual blood, intoxicants, etc.); the Devil’s Tuning Fork buzzing with the derision of Power. Whereas the Calvinist-Gnostic (Black Gnostic) steps on the pupa and witnesses the abominable substance therein. Indeed, a “regressive” Christology, one that looks for anti-metaphors in the Old Testament, lends the blood a different sameness, a proper striking power: it is precisely there that a total destitution, a total depravity of the Father himself, puts the “general exchange” (between Zhou and the butterfly) of the blood to death. It is precisely there that the aforementioned irreverent substances putrefy the blood into catastrophic venom.

Another bestial passage in the Zhuangzi, about a turtle, pertains to life and death. Curiously, Zhou concluding with affirming base life is not unlike Continental affirmation of the same base life, so much so that one could perform a short circuit between the passage itself and the Continental blueprint of “absent centers” engendering life itself. That the dead turtle is described as a literal absent center of a great multiplicity is not even one step removed from current Hegelianism, it simply is it, that Zhou does not mention a hypothetical living turtle, but the dead turtle itself being hypothetically alive—all of this “changes things”: life itself becomes hypothetical, rather than muddy (i.e. classically Material), an occult emanation from the temple of Power. That the two officials answer Zhou’s “own” question for him is an all but explicit disclosure that Power accounts for irreverence by simply being proactively irreverent. Conversely, Ian Paisley says:

In that summons is the fearsome condensing of the three hours of darkness when Christ went into the very eye of God’s awful storm of wrath upon sin—when He endured such affliction that had He not been Omnipotent He would have died the victim and not the victor—the agony which brought from the heart of the Sufferer that mysterious cry, “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken me!”

Therefore, the foreshortening of the dead and living bodies is an almost literal refusal to laugh at the joke of vivifying. In fact, Zhou himself can be regarded as precisely this, a homunculus or imp—irreverence itself—administering the realm of Power. Indeed, this is not so much uncharacteristic of orientalism, but covertly characteristic, exactly as orientalism itself is likewise covertly characteristic of Continentalism. Their transubstantiation being not unlike that between the two bestial bodies. In this sense, banishing the Zhou “opens” the space of Gnostic interiority which is where the incestuous contiguity of the two bestial bodies is realized (talk about “Alchemy”!). Golgotha is the very superposition of the ancestral temple and the mud: the eye of God’s awful storm of wrath upon sin is there only to forgive himself. The forbidden operation of all orthodoxy is precisely this: “synthesizing” the “two” holes of the cylinder into “one”.

A third bestial passage, about an ox, pertains to something and nothing. Conversely, there is an “anti-opposition”, so to speak, between the passage and the Gnostic position. Ian Paisley says:

WHAT WAS THE REAL VEIL?

But this of course is a type.

What was the real veil? The real veil was the flesh of the Lord Jesus. If you turn over to the book of Hebrews chapter 10:19, It says “Having therefore boldness to enter into the holiest,” you don’t need to worry, you can be bold to enter in. You don’t need to hang your head and try to sneak in, there is no sneaking-in needed. The barricade is away, completely removed, so you walk in with boldness to the throne of grace. “By a new and living way.” What is that way? The blood of Jesus. How did He consecrate that way? By the veil, that is to say His flesh. His flesh was the veil. That is most interesting. His flesh, His body, His humanity, was that veil.

You know, if you turn in your Testament to Matthew’s Gospel 27, you will find something preceded the rending of that veil. You will find there the story of the cross. You will find there the story of those who parted His garments. Verse 34 “They gave him vinegar to drink mingled with gall; and when he had tasted thereof, he would not drink. And they crucified him, and parted his garments, casting lots; that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet, They parted my garments among them and upon my vesture did they cast lots.” Then if you go on through the reading you will find that there was one garment they did not part and that was His robe. They did not tear it asunder. What was that robe? It was the robe that covered the body of Christ as He walked on this earth. Behind that robe was the sinless humanity of the Son of God, and no man could tear one rent in the covering of the sinless body of the Son of God, but on the cross the veil was rent from top to bottom.

Last night, as I was studying this text I discovered that the first blows that fell on Christ in punishment were blows upon His head. Rending the veil, the flesh, from the top to the bottom. Before they spiked His feet they had already crowned His head with thorns. Before they spiked His feet they had already torn the hairs from off His face. Before they spiked His feet they had already beaten Him on the head and spat upon Him. The veil rent from the top to the bottom! It is in the rending of that veil that we have a way into the Holiest of all.

Of course, the Zhuangzi passage begins with a master admiring a servant, this textbook perversity rather compromises whatever “Metaphysical” wealth is purportedly prepared therefrom. That the knife does not encounter the ox and vice versa maps onto the blueprint of master and servant (Power and irreverence) “not encountering each other” or, more properly speaking, disappearing into the nuptial chamber and becoming one flesh—something proactively done by Power itself. It is no coincidence that flesh itself is thereby condemned to this absolute suspension in a matrix of interstices, the intersection of lines being as the undue contiguity of Power or irreverence, this time of something and nothing. Paisley affirms a kind of “schizosomia”, a body, or bodily violation, showing through or—why not?—peering through the innocuous foliage of the vulgar body, the “anti-irreverent” unwanted answer of what happened to the ox, Metaphysically speaking. The Zhuangzi passage concerns the servant’s chamber and servant’s work, Paisley enters the master’s chamber and forcefully feeds him the ox. Is the lamb-lion transfiguration not something like a “schizoagnia”? This total bodily violation, not to mention bestialization, smashes the Holy of Holies—total destitution.

#yaldabaoth #gnosis #gnosticism #demiurge #baudrillard #ian paisley #zhuangzi #zhuang zhou #have paragraphs for once

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