The Lynchian Imagination
Today would have been David Lynch’s 79th birthday. I’ve decided to share this piece — adapted from Image Control — for two reasons. The first is that it’s hard to overestimate Lynch’s influence on my work and my life. As
wrote recently, there’s so much in Lynch that shouldn’t work but does work. No one else could disarm your inner skeptic so effortlessly, and make you want to believe. What precisely to believe in is another matter — and maybe irrelevant.The second reason is a kind of refutation. Image Control is a book about the photographic sensibility as applied to social media, and how that affects our relationships with one another, as well as with ourselves. Because of this, it’s also a book about fascism. I wrote it during the first Trump administration, when the overall mood — from the media, from corporations, from the Democratic Party, from “the mainstream” — seemed to suggest that a Trump administration was something to #resist, a kind of anomaly that must never happen again. It wasn’t “normal.” Today, this mainstream has embraced what’s happening to our country. It is, in this pop reasoning, “what people want.”
This kind of conformity isn’t new. One of my critiques of social media, after all, is the way it homogenizes culture. (As
just wrote yesterday, that “we” all log on to the same four to seven websites every day is a monoculture.) But whereas this conformity used to be somewhat banal and dull — the “love is love” schlock for sale at Target; the administration of corporate DEI initiatives; the way canceling a “problematic” person is social justice; resisting critical authority because people “have the right” to like whatever they like, etc. — the post-election shift pushes conformity into another register, malevolent and even deadly. As Davis observed, “shortly after Meta announced a relaxation of its hate-speech rules and suspension of fact-checking for Facebook and Instagram, The Intercept leaked examples of newly permissible language from the company’s internal training materials.” That Silicon Valley — after “disrupting” worldwide media with what is now the dominant model of transmitting information — has fully transitioned to right-wing propaganda is only the beginning, I fear, of the kind of mass conformity we’ll see in the indefinite future (I don’t begrudge anyone their fantasy of “four years,” but I can’t believe in it, sorry).Lynch’s films — not to mention his music, his paintings, his interviews, the way he treated actors, and his chit-chat — are an endless source of pleasure for anyone looking for what doesn’t conform, what doesn’t fit, what doesn’t die on the screen or the page. From the juxtapositions in his films to his golly-gee attitude despite giving cinema its most nightmarish visions, few were as relentlessly, delightfully surprising. And as these last several days of public mourning have demonstrated, few were as fiercely loved. I tried to get at what in his work makes me feel like life is so much more than what we see.
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Talent was blazing through the columns and onto the coffee tables. The physical-assault metaphors had taken over the reviews . . . “Gut-busting” and “gut-wrenching” were accolades. “Nerve-shattering,” “eye-popping,” “bone-crunching” — the responsive critic was a crushed, impaled, electrocuted man.
~ Renata Adler, Speedboat
In his Confessions, Augustine recalls losing a close friend at a young age. This is prior to his ascetic relationship with God, at a moment in his life when his habits, patterns, and supports were crumbling: “Whither should my heart flee from my heart? Whither should I flee from myself? Whither not follow myself?” Ultimately, it’s only in God’s truth — in the “perfect man” of Christ — that Augustine finds his peace: “Our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee.”
The sincerity of Augustine’s gratitude is palpable, enviable. For most of my adult life, I’ve never perceived or allowed myself to have a soul. It’s difficult to read these Confessions and not crave Augustine’s assurance that there is something beyond the body’s chemistry of neurons and amines, its meat and memory. Of course, this is why one believes — why I believe — so adamantly in the necessity of art, and why another might believe in the necessity of meditation, and why a third might find it spiritually crucial to cause and prolong unbearable suffering in others — even those they’ve never met — in order to “save” them.
As an atheist, I’ve shied away from “soul” for so long that to say it sincerely feels transgressive. But what kind of idiot resists the extraordinary gift of wanting to have a soul?
It’s the wanting that’s important, the sense that this something should be there, or perhaps, even, that it is there. The religious or spiritual impulse is a craving for unverified, unverifiable knowledge, even if we know that knowledge, or feel it, to be right or real. This is why so much art, even the most fantastical, fictional stories, feel true. Art and experiences like it beckon the call of the conscience.
A person’s conscience is their “with-knowledge” within, a sensibility that can be developed or demeaned over time, depending on how often one listens to its call. Conscience, according to Heidegger1, discloses: “If we analyse conscience more penetratingly, it is revealed as a call. Calling is a mode of discourse. The call of conscience has the character of an appeal to Dasein [one’s own ‘Being-there’] by calling it to its own most potentiality-for-Being-Self; and this is done by way of summoning it to its own most Being-guilty.” Why guilty? Unlike shame, guilt recognizes action from being: it accepts time as a potential source of change, rather than confining one’s identity in the permanence of imagined space. Shame is; guilt is right now. A person is guilty because of their actions — what they’ve said, what they’ve done, even what they’ve thought. Often, these actions are at odds with that person’s belief in who they “really” are — “who I am deep down,” “who I’ve always been,” and so on. “To the call of conscience,” Heidegger goes on, “there corresponds a possible hearing. Our understanding of the appeal unveils itself as our wanting to have a conscience.” One wants, in other words, to be guided, even if by one’s own innermost self or life or voice or soul, or — if not — by some outward manifestation of that same moral compass, be it God, an ideology, a practice, a relationship with the natural world, a belief system; or be it an easily understood, omnipresent, abusive bigot who tells you everything is going to be okay if you just support him unconditionally, unquestioningly.
“Being-there” is an entity “which has been thrown.” For Heidegger, thrown-ness is a kind of separation from the inner life: “‘Being-thrown’ means finding oneself in some state of mind or other. One’s state-of-mind is therefore based upon thrownness.” The conscience, then, is the call back — the plea to return. The state of mind of the self has, perhaps, taken too much of its surroundings or environs into itself. In the vocabulary of this book, the self understands itself as an image, as fixed space. Heidegger calls this the “they-self” — the assimilation of what others say, what others believe, what others want, into one’s own consciousness: “Dasein, as a Being-with which understands, can listen to Others. Losing itself in the publicness and the idle talk of the ‘they,’ it fails to hear its own Self in listening to the theyself.” To rectify this with a call of conscience, with a return to a focus — a grasp — upon the inner life, Dasein “must first be able to find itself — to find itself as something which has failed to hear itself, and which fails to hear in that it listens away to the ‘they.’ This listening-away must get broken off… The possibility of another kind of hearing which will interrupt it, must be given by Dasein itself.” The person who wants to listen to their conscience — the person who wishes to develop the sensibility (and sensitivity) of the conscience2 — will place themselves at risk of experiences that may provoke the call. These experiences — art, religious relationships, intense sexual contact or fantasies, hallucinogens, psychotic episodes, extreme terror, and great jokes — are all bodily experiences; they aim themselves at what we will feel before we understand it. One seeks these experiences because they are unique and intense, and often in some inexplicable way reaffirming: “In understanding the call, Dasein is in thrall to its own most possibility of existence. It has chosen itself.” Later, Heidegger likens this call of conscience to “care”: in developing our sensibility, our conscientiousness, we care for ourselves.
It isn’t the right word, but no one “understood” this like David Lynch, who up until last week was the most visible director whose films are not only popular but resistant works of art. That is, they wrap themselves around a provocative darkness and demand, relentlessly, that the viewer’s Dasein call to itself. In Twin Peaks, for example, the Black and White Lodges seem to be the realm of what must be art. Though dressed for a hike, Dale Cooper enters the waiting room in his impeccable black suit. Laura Palmer, first seen in the series as a pale, sand-flecked corpse, wears an elegant dress. The waiting room itself — furnished with black leather chairs and art deco lamps — is the antithesis of the town’s northwestern kitsch of mounted fish, knickknacks, overstuffed sofas, and overwhelming plaid. Instead of the haunted fifties bop of the diner’s jukebox, the Black Lodge features a soundtrack of slow, dark jazz with vocals by the otherworldly Jimmy Scott. Here is the Venus de’ Medici; in the hallway, the Venus de Milo. The curtains conjure a stage. Simply being in the Lodge indicates that one is both participating in and witnessing some kind of performance, where conversation, spoken backward and reversed to create a doppelgänger of English, becomes a script.3
Lynch’s work holds a special magnetism for moths like me — those drawn to darkness, to what cannot be seen. His strobe-lit hallways, shadows, emotional juxtapositions, and uncanny doubles are cinema’s imposing Rothkos. Often, our emotional relationship with such art is an imaginary or extradimensional room of its own — one we don’t know how we’ve entered, one we don’t know when we’ll leave. In The Doubles — a passionate, genre-dismantling memoir told through film criticism — Veronica Esposito likens this space to the subconscious. Cinema, in particular, has a “unique gift” for piercing one’s core: “If music is the most euphoric art, literature the most contemplative, and painting the most prophetic, then film,” she writes, “is the most psychological. It crashes through the bottom of the soul and forces a reckoning with those long-hidden things.”
This question of the soul is an undercurrent in Esposito’s book. Contemplating Krzysztof Kieślowski’s The Double Life of Véronique— specifically the director’s “trust in mysteries that bend our paths” — she recalls a familiar image: “How many times has it been said that the cineplexes are our civilization’s cathedrals? Are these enormous, perfected, glamorized faces not heroes appropriate to a technologically learned humanity?” In dedicating her attention to film, Esposito feels herself “beginning to sketch out the counters of this faith that draws us4 to the arts. We become ourselves by what deluges us. Humanity is ritualistic, the world is the sum of our rituals.”
Faith, ritual, meaning. The soul. While The Doubles is restless, the essay on Véronique, the film from which Esposito chose her first name, is the book’s heart, its axis of being. It is not only where “art tread[s] upon worship’s grounds,” but where film’s power to shape one’s artistic sensibilities is most thoroughly explored: “Could any other art form instill the belief in a soul?”
In Véronique, a young woman in Kraków, Weronika, falls over dead in the middle of a transcendent vocal performance; the camera pans above the audience “in what can only be the vantage point of the young woman’s soul as it departs.” From that point on, for Véronique (played by the same actress) in Paris, life loses its joy and direction, its narrative. She quits her music lessons, withdraws from relationships, and loses interest in her young students. Véronique, Esposito says, “opens every last door in my skull. It assures me that life is not the world.” Under the film’s spell, she finds herself believing in, or at least sensing the existence of, something not only unseen and unproven but unseeable, unprovable. Split into that dual existence, Esposito’s double goes where she cannot, a place where reason is subservient to feeling.
In most languages, “soul” is derived from the breath or breathing, the air pushed in and out of the body; it is the soul that, as the Greeks imagined, gives wings to our words. In Véronique, this breath is everywhere: condensing on mirrors and windows, heaved out of her body during sex, wrenched out while grieving, and, above all, pushed through her lungs to make music it’s hard to believe any human body can make. In fact, one might envision that Weronika, onstage in her first and final performance, pushed that soul too hard, that she sang it right out of her body.
But the soul is also light. As Véronique wakes from a nap, a glow flitting across her face, she goes to the window and sees a boy with a mirror, teasing her from a neighboring balcony. She smiles; he and his mirror retreat into his own apartment. “So easily does the sensation of an invisible world dissolve,” Esposito remarks, but when Véronique turns back inside, the light remains — “dancing in the corner.” As she approaches it,
the shot changes: we are looking down at her… As though seized with a premonition Véronique jerks her head up, she stares into the camera. It tilts in response. The realization is immediate. It’s a point of view shot. I’m seeing from the point of view of that yellow light. Which can of course only be the point of view of Weronika… Every other mystery in Véronique has some explanation. But not this one. There is no source for the second light.
Depicting the soul as breath or light: These are ancient metaphors fossilized in language. Yet we don’t seem to tire of them. In Twin Peaks: The Return, Carl Rodd witnesses the hit-and-run killing of a young boy. As the boy’s mother screams for help, Rodd sees a blur of light lift out of his body and ascend into the clouds. The soul floating up to heaven: the stuff of Looney Tunes, and yet in Lynch’s hands, so masterful one doesn’t know whether to grieve or rejoice.
So, too, at the end of Fire Walk with Me, when Laura Palmer meets her angel in the waiting room. Instead of cringing at this cliché, I feel overcome with a feeling of immense grief, and of gratitude. Witnessing Palmer’s joy — sobs that turn into laughter — is one of the most inexplicably moving experiences I’ve had in front of a screen. In what is possibly the greatest triumph of the human imagination over its animal chemistry, it makes me unafraid of death.
The soul and desire seem synonymous to me because, without desire, there is no struggle against time. To want for nothing is to float as flotsam in time’s river until your life is washed out to sea and forgotten.
In Eros the Bittersweet, Carson describes an unstable triangulation of seeing: “Writing about desire, the archaic poets made triangles with their words. Or, to put it less sharply, they represent situations that ought to involve two factors (lover, beloved) in terms of three (lover, beloved and the space between them, however realized).” Desire itself opens up a new dimension: what should be a simple connection between two points is complicated by a third. That third dimension — the space between lover and beloved, reader and text, audience and artwork — is what destabilizes a flat, orderly, linear universe.
This is art, a rupture in space — the very instability of which demands its closure as quickly as possible. Here is where the critic’s effort to interpret comes from, or to explain, to name, to categorize, to pull back the curtain, to reduce this magic to smoke and mirrors. The universe is torn and seeks to sew itself shut. With art, something inexplicable yet magnetic is happening, and as long as it exists — as long as the spell of it lingers — there is not only our world as we understand it but our world and whatever this is, whatever’s out there defying all we know. It’s the mark of a long-lasting work of art to keep that unstable space open, dangerous, exciting, uninterpretable.
Where Eros reigns, Hermes, the messenger god (from which we get hermeneutics, the practice of interpretation), cannot follow. The ruptures art tears open are dark. Experiences of desire, as Carson points out, are terrible; its metaphors are of “war, disease and bodily dissolution.”5 For these poets, “Change of self is loss of self.” To desire is to melt or collapse, to blend or break. The boundaries of self — and the body imagined alongside it — are violated; there is no longer a skin to point to, in a sense, that shields whatever “you” are from whatever the rest of us, or the world, may be.
In contemporary life, where more of what is tangible is retreating into a digital dimension of its own, to fall under art’s spell may become increasingly important — and, in certain capacities, increasingly dangerous. There are people — me included — who find great pleasure in being so changed, so destroyed. Twin Peaks is without a doubt my Véronique — the closest experience I’ve had to believing in something resembling a soul. Like the Black and White Lodges depicted in its universe, it opens a space within me, a cavernous sanctuary wherein I feel safe, expansive, limitless, loved. This does not mean, of course, that I imagine myself — or that anyone experiencing a work of art imagines oneself — within the universe or realm depicted; only an idiot would “feel safe” in Twin Peaks. This is not what I mean by the opening of space. Instead, what is between me and Twin Peaks is a field of great tension, and it’s this tension which opens something new, that charges itself like a great energy field, that gathers to itself an unfathomable gravity, like a black hole, and which offers me some place to hide or leave a part of myself — if not forever, for as long as the portal, let’s call it, is open. For as long as the event horizon, let’s call it, pulls and bends my light toward it.
Unfortunately, this same magnetism applies to aesthetic projects which employ erotic tension (that is, which seduce) without an ethical compass — or those which deliberately smash that compass. Benjamin, in the 1930s, wrote that “the logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into politics.” It is, he said, a political system that gives “the masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves.” Even Goebbels himself reflected that politics was “the highest and most comprehensive art.” To mention erotics in combination with fascism, especially National Socialism, usually refers to the eroticized aesthetics of fascism. But the true seductive power of fascism is not aesthetic at all, no matter how eroticized these aesthetics may be. In fact, these aesthetics hide fascism’s vast and absolute erotic intensity — its capacity to unendingly withhold release or relief or satisfaction from every single one of its believers.
Populism, as Ernesto Laclau wrote, “requires the dichotomic division of society into two camps — one presenting itself as a part which claims to be the whole.” On a political level, this is the field of tension Carson describes — the imagined completeness of one “camp” frustrated by seeing its own incompleteness reflected back. In the populist crowd, especially the fascist crowd, “there is the experience of a lack, a gap which has emerged in the harmonious continuity of the social. There is a fullness of the community which is missing. This is decisive: the construction of the ‘people’ will be the attempt to give a name to that absent fullness.” Fascism is a political art that wraps itself around darkness, that pulls its believers inward and intensifies their desire for “order” (death) and “greatness” (destruction) by ever prolonging, delaying, and denying that desire. Fascist theater is a masterpiece of erotic art, and — as we’ve seen — one of the most dangerous works of art there is.
Of the practice of art, including experiences as total and as deadly as fascism, what I think is that we are all looking for places to leave these pieces of ourselves, and that it’s somehow imperative to us that we don’t understand where these places come from, nor even, with any predictability, where to find them. What I think is that we are all looking to fill what is dark — what is terrifying, what is delightful, what is sublime — with the immense, inexhaustible light of our souls. Whereas Heidegger imagined one’s consciousness as “thrown” and that the conscience calls it back, what I think is that one’s conscience throws the soul — into art, into religious experiences, into sex, into whatever ecstasy translates for us — and the call is that which calls us not back but forward. This, I think, is why poets create words, why social media users make memes, why lonely people write books: we drag ourselves through time by throwing our souls forward, by projecting them into ideas or experiences that hold us under the intensity of their spells, and we then imagine they call us, beckon us. And when the magic is over, we cast these souls into something new.
Creation is how we allow ourselves the experience of time without the trauma of seeing it as space. It is how we watch ourselves as we live, and how we teach ourselves to watch others as they live alongside us.
Speaking of conscience, I’m aware of Heidegger’s notorious politics — namely, his collaboration with the Nazis as they swept through German universities, which is not only unconscionable but mysterious. That is, there’s a darkness between Heidegger’s written moral clarity w/r/t the conscience, the inner life, the soul, and the moral failure of his actions. That a person can articulate so richly and magnetically (that is, so frustratingly unclearly) the inner workings of the conscience and ignore their own is, at the very least, a warning.
Like Heidegger’s Dasein, Augustine wants to be guided, and places this desire — his soul, because what else would a soul be but desire — in the imagined heart of Christ, which, by the grace of Augustine’s own will, guides (or pulls) Augustine forward through life.
These impressions, which Edmund Burke identifies as “whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger,” must remain at a distance in order to feel sublime. They are, he writes, “delightful when we have an idea of pain and danger, without being actually in such circumstances.” The sublime “anticipates our reasonings, and hurries us on by an irresistible force.”
Again, Lynch’s aesthetics and erotics seem aimed at the inner life Heidegger describes: “The caller [of conscience] is Dasein in its uncanniness: primordial, thrown Being-in-the-world as the ‘not-at-home’ — the bare ‘that-it-is’ in the ‘nothing’ of the world. The caller is unfamiliar to the everyday they-self.”
Without interpretation, there is no language. An experience of art we don’t understand is not “like” anything we’ve seen. In fact, there’s something about it we’re not seeing — no other half to reach for and pull close until what is delightful becomes banal, ready-made, repeatable. Our words are left unfinished.