No open-access location is known for this record yet.
No open-access location is known for this record yet.
And do you know what is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end... enclosed by nothingness as by a boundary... blessing itself as that which must return eternally, as a becoming that knows no satiety, no disgust, no weariness... this, my Dionysian world, the eternally self-creating, the eternally self-destroying... without goal, unless the joy of the circle is itself a goal. Friedrich Nietzsche, Will to Power Oh, I'd give anything to get out of Oz altogether; but which is the way back to Kansas? Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz ENTERING THE LYNCHIAN UNIVERSE IS LIKE ENTERING A body. It requires the delicate negotiation of a series of tunnels: garden hose, throat, hallway, telephone cord, umbilical cord, eustachian tube; passageways that link one of his films to the next, that lead from one ear out the other, across film genres and histories, across green lawns and trailer parks. One finds here a hell as familiar as our own, a wax world whose lines and forms are forever melting, where each object slowly transforms into its opposite, and where all things, even the most irreconcilable, are bound by a labyrinth of intricate web-like relations. For years, critics have been treating the patient with psychoanalysis and scolding Lynch for his incorrect politics, but little attention has been given to the visual philosophy he has been projecting across the cinema screen. His work has offended equally reactionary conservative and political liberal. My intention is to venerate Lynch for either of these two dominant positions, for that would be to rob him of one of his highest achievements; rather I would like to interpret his most recent film Lost Highway in relation to narrative and critical philosophy in order to bring a different lens to bear on the works of Lynch, but more broadly as an occasion to question the relation of narrative to film. Lost Highway opens and concludes with an image of the road, or more specifically, of the yellow dotted-line, a vertical axis, flickering rapidly by in the darkness. It is in this image, which appears throughout what is otherwise not explicitly a road film the moment someone enters a car or takes a pertinent passage from one point to another, that the metaphoric play of the film commences. It is in this metaphor that all films become road films. The image is familiar. It has recurred throughout Lynch's films since Blue Velvet (1986), when the reference to America's classic road film The Wizard of Oz (1939) and its yellow brick road first began. (1) This reference comes out of the closet in Lynch's explicit road film Wild at Heart (1990), where the wicked witch travels by broom alongside the escaping lovers and Lulu clicks her ruby slippers in vain in a roadside motel in Big Tuna. Somewhere in the transition from Dorothy to Lulu and from the Emerald City to Big Tuna, a hammer blow has landed, a mask cracked, a veil torn away. Lost Highway is the receding reflection of that laughing veil in the rear-view mirror, before its uncanny double emerges ahead in the distance. Driving is the sound of tearing cloth. In speaking of Lynch's virtuoso use of sound, Michel Chion demands that we listen to Lynch's films, but that we listen with our eyes. (2) In a similar spirit I would like to suggest that we think philosophy when we watch Lynch's films, but that we think it with our eyes and ears. One of the best legacies of the critiques of metaphysics has been the insistence on thinking Being in the form of an Aristotelian logic of stable identity, a conception which suited the interests of systematic and scientific thinking, but rather as inseparable from temporality and spatiality, a conception more suitable to the interests of addressing experience and creative forms. Lynch's films show only that the ontological and epistemological appear, but that they must appear in particular styles. …
Loading…
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 5 citations exist upstream.
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.