Home » 2008 » December

Archive for December, 2008:


David Lynch’s Doppelgangers

Published by Michael Arnzen in Film on December 26th, 2008

 In psychology, the shadow is the part of the unconscious that swallows threatening information and experiences that a conscious mind cannot hold onto and, at the same time, remain functional. However, a periodic confrontation with the shadow is necessary for a healthy psyche. In a Lynch film it is often the job of some sort of rule-maker, interrogator, or detective to engineer just such a confrontation. These detective types set boundaries on a film’s fantasy narrative and try to steer the main character back to the truth. — Adam C. Walker

The “Shadow Self and Detective” (in other words, the doppelganger and alter-ego) is one of 12 “tools” that Adam C. Walker offers in his insightful essay, “Reading Inland Empire: A Mental Toolbox for Interpreting a Lynch Film” (Metaphilm, Nov 2007).  What I really like about this article is that it clearly provides a number of frameworks for comprehending David Lynch’s seemingly impenetrable narratives (not just Inland Empire itself), by looking specifically at recurring narrative structures.

My favorite doppelganger from Lynch’s work is Robert Blake as the “Mystery Man” from Lost Highway.  In an interview with Cinefantastique, Lynch describes him as  a “character [who] came out of a feeling of a man who, whether real or not, gave the impression that he was supernatural.”

“Whether real or not” is a hallmark of not only uncanny uncertainty, but Lynch’s proclivity for subjective realism on a plane that alienates most pop audiences.  But what I like about David Lynch is this persistent use of surrealism, framed in a way that inevitably makes you wonder “Where is this going?”  That is the enigma of all plot forms, but Lynch constantly keeps us guessing because the way he puts together scenes is always skewed while remaining just “familiar” enough to hook our interest.  Something is going on, but we’re never told quite what it is.  The “Mystery Man” embodies this, employing his camera through tout the film in dastardly ways.

Beyond character, Walker suggests that the template for understanding Lynch’s narrative strategy is Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” since Lynch seems to loop plots together as if they were echo-effects of some primary event that are pinging off the walls of a central character’s mind.  There is no story so much as there is a vague sense of deja vu, as characters try to understand their own dilemmas — which are our dilemmas in the very act of experiencing the film.  Paramnesia at play: the subjective experience of a Lynch film is the cinematic equivalent of waking up from not a dream, but a concussion.

Steve Shaviro describes it perfectly, in his treatment of Lynch’s Lost Highway (here lifted from his work in progress, Stranded in the Jungle, but for his brilliant full article on LH see Paradoxa 1998):

…the first half of Lost Highway is so brooding and mysterious. It pushes up against the limits of what can be seen and said. So much is hinted at, and so little is shown. Even the event upon which the whole film turns, Fred’s apparent murder of Renee, does not take place on screen. We see what comes before, and what comes after. But we do not–cannot–see the act itself. It is missing from the body of the film, just as it is missing from Fred’s own consciousness. The murder drives the story, but it stands apart from the story. It is like an intrusion from another world.

Lost Highway explores this “intrusion” of the uncanny in many ways that are founded in earlier forms of cinema, rendering this film a double of other films in a highly subjective allusion to film genre history.  Much has been written about this.  Zizek has written a lengthy article on how the film is an “apotheosis of horror and noir genres” in his article “The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime”.  Fiona Villella discusses how its “Circular Narrative” echoes the narratology of the French New Wave.  Maarten de Pourcq looks at the uncanny way that sound and image work together in the film, referencing others.  Alana Thain (.pdf) sees the film as “haunted by Hitchcock’s Vertigo.”  And Valterri Kokko sees the uncanny at the center of “Psychological Horror in the Films of David Lynch.”

Film is a highway on which you get lost; if his movies don’t make sense to you, they are succeeding…you’re lost.

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Smoking Stunts and Growths

Published by Michael Arnzen in Advertising on December 19th, 2008

roy_castle_3

Wow!  This image from the Roy Castle Lung Cancer Foundation’s (UK) anti-second hand smoke campaign stunned me for a moment, with its visual echo of my recent post about the website, Photoshop Disasters. (Via the excellent advertising watchblog, AdGoodness).

In that original post, I wrote:  “We always already understand that advertising is manipulative and fake, and yet when the flaw appears, the optical illusion is shattered — the collision of consumerist fantasy against marketing reality is sometimes felt as a return of a repressed desire.”

My thinking presupposed that such freakish bodily anomalies as the giant hand image above were accidental, like Freudian slips.  Here the freak skewing is intentional and inherently artistic.  Why might it still strike one as uncanny? 

Perhaps it is the various contradictions embodied in the image:  the smoker’s fantasy (smoking makes one look younger, feel relaxed,  sophisticated, etc.) is at once contradicted by the way smoking “stunts” growth and can lead to birth defects.  And it’s not just the body anomaly that triggers these feelings and negative affect. Note the empty coat hanger dangling from the knob, right beside the smoking girl, dressed in an outfit that calls attention to itself with its bold color in a sparse white room. She herself is positioned in a mirror image of that dead white space, where another knob would be (behind her head).  Her shadow seems to be peeling away from the hanger.  The implied idea is a sort of before-and-after effect:  if the smoking continues, the narrative suggests, she will soon be “out of the picture” (reinforced by the absent mother off screen who the kid is implicitly glaring at).  The empty room with its bare wire hanger is a harbinger of death.

A powerful use of Photoshop to make a point.  See the other photographs in the campaign for full impact.  Or check out AdGoodness’ “weird” category.

Tags: , , , , , , ,

Gel Remote: Object Empathy and The Tactile Uncanny

Published by Michael Arnzen in Art+Music, Theory on December 12th, 2008
A 'psychodesign' from Adbusters magazine.

A 'psychodesign' from Adbusters magazine.

Adbusters # 78 asks “What if design stood up for itself? What if instead of bowing immediately to our demands, design gently pushed back?”  In the “Psychodesign” slideshow (by Sarah Nardi), products like Panasonic Design Company‘s experimental ”Gel Remote” (above) are framed as a political use of the uncanny, animating the inanimate icons of everyday life in order to challenge and subvert the objects that enable our sense of mastery and dominance over the environment:

Inert and lifeless, design is animated only through human use. It exists only by virtue of its functionality, possessing no reality independent of its purpose in our world. Would we think of it differently if it were alive?

What products designs like these are asking us to do is empathize with objects, which in my opinion (following Susan Verducci) can be a progressive and moral outcome of an imaginative representation of the uncanny in the arts. 

But the “gel remote” got me thinking about the sensation of touch.  The gel remote — and other forms of haptic technology/art/design — are inanimate objects that “touch back”  when we touch them.  So much of the theoretical work on the uncanny has been about the visual realm and other forms of representation; haptic technology and art is a new media form that projects a sort of tactile sensation of the uncanny, which in some ways is like a “return of the gaze” in the plane of the visual. 

A little web research reveals the artistic history behind the remote and other objects of this ilk.  It stems from Kenya Hara’s attempt to assemble a group of Japanese artists to design an object from everyday life that animated tactile perception.  Japan Society cites him on the concept:

“The concept of ‘haptic,’…leads to the idea that we not only design form by creating a shape or an object, we also design how it feels. A human being is a bundle of delicate senses. Science doesn’t only help the evolution of materials and media, it also helps us understand the senses, where there may be hidden a whole new, undiscovered territory. . . ‘Haptic’ means another design attempt to expand the world atlas of senses.”

The Lighthouse art museum of Glasgow hosted this “haptic art” exhibition earlier this year, showing the Gel Remote along with a few other designs that I’d place in this category of the tactile uncanny, like Naoto Fukasawa‘s “Juice Skin”:

juiceskin

These examples of the repackaging of nature (a la Next Nature) are at once novel and attractive.  A review by The Scotsman of the Haptic exhibition celebrates the mission in our audio-visual centered world to reawaken the senses of touch, but laments that samples of these art objects were rubbed smooth by passers-by. 

We are both attracted to and repulsed by such objects. 

A good starting point for explaining the feelings aroused by actually touching — rather than seeing — this sort of object might be this example from Jentsch’s essay on the Uncanny, which describes the “intellectual uncertainty” one has when one can’t tell what causes a “perceived movement”:

One can read now and then in old accounts of journeys that someone sat down in an ancient forest on a tree trunk and that, to the horror of the traveler, this trunk suddenly began to move and showed itself to be a giant snake…. As long as the doubt as to the nature of the perceived movement lasts, and with it the obscurity of its cause, a feeling of terror persists in the person concerned.

The terror he describes is triggered by sitting on an object that shows itself to actually be a subject.  More than just the striking surprise of a statue that suddenly lights up with life, there is a moment of abjection on top of the terror caught up in touching what one assumed was “dead” material that surprisingly touches back with a “life” all its own.  This sensation of touch literally “pushes our buttons” perhaps more forcefully than any other form of the uncanny.  Haptic art/tech does not merely reawaken the sense of touch; it triggers a reflexive response that inherently asks us to rethink our assumptions about the environment.

Tags: , , , , , , , ,