By VLADIMIR SAFATLE*
Considerations on the work of the recently deceased filmmaker
"Mène-moi ver la vie / Au-delà de la grille basse / Qui me sépare de moi même / Qui divise tout sauf mes cendres / Sauf la terreur que j'ai de moi” (Paul Eluard).
1.
“You’ll never have me.” She says this phrase after having sex with him in front of a parked car with its headlights on. Afterwards, she goes into a roadside stand to disappear once and for all. He changes persona and follows her to the stand. But there, all she finds is a man with makeup like he’s just stepped out of a B-grade horror movie. A man with a camera in his hand who shouts: “What’s your name, anyway?” This is not as easy a question as it might seem. As we will see, its difficulty comes from the phrase that still echoes in the head of this character who cannot answer for his name: “You’ll never have me.” Perhaps she will tell us why only a time like ours could produce a film like this. The lost road.
It is often said that David Lynch has become a dark filmmaker, one of those who love narratives that dissolve into a maze of labyrinths and false clues. But we can also say that he is someone who clearly exposes his intentions. For example, in a certain sense, the story of The lost road It is banal. It is divided into two parts. In the first, saxophonist Fred Madison murders his mysterious wife, Renée. Between the two, there was an atmosphere of catastrophic silence and female betrayal. Fred does not remember the murder. He only found out about it through a video made by someone who entered his house and filmed him as he was kneeling in the bedroom next to his wife's mangled body.
In the second part, mechanic Pete Dayton begins an affair with Alice: the lover of Mr. Eddy/Dick Laurent, a gangster-producer of pornographic films. Laurent discovers the affair and Alice convinces the mechanic to commit a robbery and flee with her towards the desert. There, in the middle of the desert, she disappears after having sex with Pete.
The narrative material is banal, but the composition is not. All the peculiarity of The lost road is in this tension between rotten elements of cinematographic language and composition processes capable of provoking strangeness in the face of what was seen a lot.[I] They are the ones who weave the seam between the two stories within the film, they are the ones who duplicate details and characters (Fred Madison/Peter Dayton; Renée/Alice) creating a kind of dizzying Moebius strip in which the front necessarily transforms into the back.
But the complexity of Lynch's duplications is relative because it is subject to a general model of organization. In this sense, the title, The lost road, could not be more didactic and indicative. It necessarily refers to a road movie, but without forgetting that it is a road movie failed: story of someone who got lost along the way.
Here we are faced with one of the central elements of Paul Éluard Lynch's films: the road. It is not only present in The lost road, 1997. Wild at heart, A true story¸ just to name the most obvious, they are films structured as a road-movie. Mulholland drive, which was presented as the sequel to our film, is also something like a road movie, and it is no coincidence that traffic signs, street signs and other signs of movement appear so frequently in the film.
But here the question is: what exactly is a road movie? We can say that it is, first of all, the contemporary successor to the old coming-of-age novels. We will follow someone who will go on a journey and reach his destination, but on this journey, he will come across an event that will destroy his old and limited horizon of understanding. From this destruction, he will emerge transformed into another person. After this journey, the character will find the true point of arrival and will never be the same again, he will change his identity. That said, The lost road is road movie perfect or perhaps the only one road movie about the impossibility of a road movie.
And The lost road um road movie we will ask three central questions: What is the point of arrival? What is the event? What impetus moves the path? They will allow us to find the fixed points that structure the film's narrative.
2.
Let's start with the first question.
"Dick Laurent is dead”. When Fred Madison hears this phrase on the intercom in his house, the film will begin. Who said it, no one knows. For almost the entire film this will be a statement without an enunciator, a voice without a body. But this phrase will be a kind of formula capable of organizing the meaning of the cinematic action, just like the imperative “The sleeper must awake” repeated ad infinitum em Dune.
Who is Dick Laurent? We only find out in the second part of the film: he is a gangster and a businessman in the porn industry who has a “paternal” relationship with Pete, the man who will take Fred Madison’s place. A figure who is both paternal and obscene: this combination cannot leave us indifferent. He appears in several of David Lynch’s films. His authority figures are always at the exact point where the enunciation of the Law and the assumption of pleasure intersect. In this sense, nothing is more emblematic than the scene in which Dick Laurent, driving his car at the speed set by the Law, is overtaken by a driver in a hurry.
The punishment will come without mercy: the driver will be thrown off the road, pulled from his car, forced to his knees with a gun pointed at his head while Laurent beats him, shouting that he is irresponsible for driving like that, that he should learn to respect the Law since 30% of road accidents happen in situations like that. The enunciation of the Law appears as the ultimate form of realization of sadistic pleasure.
Killing Dick Laurent is, therefore, a way of suspending this Law that hides an obscene pleasure between its lines. A desire for revelation that we find in other Lynch films. What is the story of the television series? Twin Peaks, for example, if not the seemingly infinite process of dissolving the image of order and virtue of a small town in the Mountains into a tangle of unconfessable modes of enjoyment? As if Lynch's true desire were to unveil the desiring machine that hides behind the formations of the Law. A bit like Joseph K., the Kafkaesque hero of The process, who, upon entering the court and finally being able to leaf through the pages of the book of Law, only finds pornographic drawings.
"Dick Laurent is dead”. When this phrase is repeated, when the same Fred Madison says it on his intercom and “speaks to himself”, the film will have ended. The journey will be complete: the message seems to find an enunciator[ii]. Fred seems to have done what he was destined to do, to have taken the place that was his from the beginning; even if he didn't know it.
But perhaps “complete” is not the right word, for some radical inadequacy keeps driving the character down his lost road. Even after Dick Laurent is dead, Fred Madison will not fully realize his destiny. So if the classic theme of a road movie consists of showing the path through which a subject must go to “become what one is”, to use an expression of Nietzsche, assuming the enunciation of one’s true path, The lost road tells us the story of this blocked path that goes from oneself to oneself, of this impossibility of the autonomous voice that resonates like a destiny to take on the body chosen to embody it. As I said, the story of a process of formation, or of its failure.
3.
Therefore, we must ask ourselves about the causes of this failure, which puts us on the path to the fundamental event that causes Fred Madison to lose the map that could guide him on his path.
It is true that the film seems, in a way, to start too late. From the beginning, the atmosphere is heavy, the dialogues and glances that pass between Fred and Renée, his wife, are dry and difficult; one gets the impression that something terrifying has already happened. The event seems to have already taken place. But if we look at Lynch's other films, we will find a valuable indication that can guide us: all the events happen at the hands of women.
Em blue velvet, Jeffrey's journey towards an experience capable of breaking with the lesser certainties of his stable world of a quiet town in the American countryside will be driven by his encounter with Dorothy Vallens, a mysterious cabaret singer who never fails to remind us of the same semantic constellation of fragility and seduction as Renée/Alice. His path will take him to Dorothy's room, where, hidden inside a closet, he will discover the masochistic and incestuous ritual that links her to Frank: a violent and impotent bandit. By coming face to face with this negativity that marks everything that is sexual, Jeffrey will be able to fulfill his destiny.
Sex appears here as a real place. As it will appear later in Mullholand drive, since it will only be after the young and dazzled Betty has sex with Rita (another one of those female characters marked by mystery, in the Dorothy Vallens – Renée/Alice lineage) that her world of dreams will give way to a Theater of Illusions that, for her, will have the value of a Theater of horror: the only way for an experience of the real order to make itself felt.
Em The lost road, the procedure is no different. Let us first remember that the reason why Dick Laurent must die is simple: he is between Pete and Alice (later he will appear having sex with Renée). He deprives Pete of Alice's pleasure and killing him is the only way to achieve it. But this question linked to the deprivation of pleasure seems to permeate some central moments of The lost road.
So in the first part of the film, we see a stunned and sweaty Fred Madison trying to have sex with Renée. The images are in slow motion to emphasize the body as flesh. Unfortunately, the end result will be some back-slapping and a comforting: “It's ok, it's ok”. The ground opens up between Fred and the enjoyment of his object of desire. A gap as wide as the one that definitively separates him from himself.
But this doesn't seem to be Pete's problem. On the contrary, as the police officer assigned to watch him will say: "Where does he get so many pussies?" Yes, unlike Fred, Pete knows how to do it. He knows so well that he ends up falling in love with the woman who is reduced to her mere instrumental condition: the pornographic film actress. A woman reduced to the condition of imaginary support for fetishes. Only this woman reduced to her own image, always available in any video store and ready-to-wear will be exactly the one who will say: “You will never have me”. Pete fell in love with an image that fades into the desert, just as Fred doesn't know what to do with the woman's flesh he has in his hands. Both of them took them down a lost road.
In this sense, killing Dick Laurent could never lead Fred/Pete to achieve that which would give some stability to his search. For this object is essentially vaporous, trompe l'oeil made of images and projections. The lost road tells the story of the discovery of how opaque are the objects to which desire insists on being linked. A discovery that leads us to a traumatic encounter with the impossibility of finishing the journey. A traumatic encounter with a destiny that can only be achieved as a fall.
4.
This story of elusive objects and slippery porn actresses would not be so emblematic if it were not linked to some central issues in 1990s cinema.
Cinema in the 1990s saw a general movement that we could call a “return to reality”. Contrary to the hyper-plastic and advertising aesthetics of the 1980s (in this sense, nothing is more illustrative than Bad blood, by Léo Carax and Diva, by Jean-Jacques Beinex), the 1990s were marked by a promise of a return to reality, which was conjugated in many ways. Lars von Trier and his friends, for example, exposed one of the facets of this return through the manifesto Dogma with its imperatives of capturing images in their “original” rawness.
An aesthetic project necessarily accompanied by “transgressive” content that aimed to reveal the perversion that was hidden behind paternal law (Party, by Thomas Vitemberg), or even reveal stupidity and cynicism as a last resort against the frustrations of social life (The idiots, Lars von Trier). The Dardenne brothers (Palme d'Or/2001 with Rosetta) led an amateur actress to repeat the aestheticized and unbearable daily life of a poor Belgian girl looking for a job.
We can say that, from The lost road, David Lynch's aesthetic project shows itself to be absolutely engaged in the coordinates of a “cinema of the real”, but his engagement obeys a completely peculiar logic, something very different from Lars von Trier's jargon of spontaneity.
Let us notice how, in The lost road, All the characters seem fake or caricatured. Each one gives us the impression of having stepped out of a movie we've already seen: the "Mystery Man" wears pancake, eye makeup and black clothes like any cheap vampire in a low-budget movie, the police officers are stupid like all police officers, Renée's lover/pimp, Andy, has tanned skin and a thin mustache like any Latin lover, at least according to Hollywood law.
The characters are too busy and sometimes seem to just repeat lines and play roles that everyone knows are worn out. Everything seems to have been reused, like a sale of old clichés from the history of cinema that no longer work properly. In this way, David Lynch films with ruins of the grammar of cinematic imagination.
This is one of the film's genius points, and it concerns David Lynch's overall creative process. It's about opening up space for an experience of reality through the mimetic repetition of a fetishized reality. In the hands of another filmmaker, these stories of a mechanic who falls in love with the old gangster's mistress, or of a tormented husband who murders his own wife without remembering anything, would become trivial stories. But Lynch knows that these stories can no longer be told – they are too worn out – and he tries to show this at every turn.
The form of the narrative structure denies the content of the story it is supposed to support. It is from this conflict that comes the irreducible impression of estrangement proper to The lost road. We live in a world where we invest libidinally in ruins. In this sense, Lynch offers us a path to sublimation by using one of the greatest devices of contemporary art, whose axis of development lies precisely in pushing its margins by introducing instability into that which, because it has been seen so often, seemed to no longer mean anything.
What was once very familiar must become strange. A strategy that opens up space for the experience of reality by shuffling the notions of identity and similarity that structure our stable universe of references, a procedure that David Lynch would later take to the extreme in Mulholland Drive.
5.
As I said, Mulholland Drive was presented as a kind of continuation of The lost road. Not that this is the resolution of the narrative. The two plots are completely different. But, in a way, Mulholland Drive advances a little further on this path already opened by its predecessor.
In the same way as in The lost road, it is often said that Mulholland Drive It doesn't have a story. Again, if we analyze it carefully, we will see that the film has a story that is relatively simple. Betty Elms arrives in Hollywood from a small town in Canada.
She wants to be someone: “An actress or a star,” she says. Her body, which has just emerged from adolescence, betrays her desire to become the person who makes a woman an object of desire. For two-thirds of the film, she keeps repeating that everything is going as she dreams. Everything happens like a trip that simply repeats the perfect images from the travel brochure.
But Betty meets a woman who seems to have come out of a Rita Hayworth movie. She doesn't know where she came from, her name is fake, and her memory was erased in a car accident. All she has is a purse full of dollars and a blue key. Nothing could be more predictable: one wants to be someone, the other doesn't know who she is but has movie-quality beauty, starlet mannerisms, and money, in other words, everything that makes someone someone. In fact, one wants to be what the other already is without knowing it.
Mulholland Drive works like a road movie two-way street: one woman wants to build a story from the present to the future, the other wants to reconstruct her story from the present to the past. Between the two there is a film that must be made, but no one agrees on who should take the place of the main actress. For now, the woman's place is empty. The actress has been presumed dead. But the film must go on and someone must come to fill the empty place, even if to do so we have to fill it with characters who are rotting away.
“Don’t make it real until it becomes real.” This is the advice the film director gave to the girl who went to her first audition to become an actress. And indeed, for two-thirds of the film, nothing seems real at all. Mulholland Drive. Again, all the characters seem fake or caricatured.
Each one gives us the impression of having stepped out of a film we've already seen: the film director wears black clothes and intellectual glasses like every film director, the stupid police officers return like all police officers, the managers of the film industry are mafiosos like all the others managers. Again, the characters are overly burdened and sometimes seem to be fighting against something superhuman in order to repeat their lines and play their roles.
But there is an even stronger impression that runs through Mulholland Drive. It's hard not to feel like we're watching a movie that, in a way, should have ended already. In this sense, the paradigmatic scene is Betty Elms' first test on her journey to becoming someone. The film's producer is a broken old man, the heartthrob she's supposed to play with is a sixty-something with a stylish tan. Miami Vice, the director of the film is someone who has been repeating the same thing for years. Betty Elms seems to have arrived too late, her film has become old. In the same way that our films have become too old. The frameworks of socialization prove incapable of supporting a production of identity without producing a remainder that does not fit into any scene.
However, if Mulholland Drive is an road movie, so where will he take Betty Elms? To the same place Lynch took Fred Madison/Pete Dayton. To a traumatic encounter with a destiny that can only be realized as a fall. If we go back to the key moment in which Pete has sex with this image of the ideal woman that he sees disappear (to be left in her place only by a mysterious man who points a camera in his direction, like a gaze that returns to itself after the dissolution of the object), then we will see that Mullholand Drive brings a structurally identical scene.
This is the moment in which Betty Elms is lying in bed, ready to sleep, while Rita (who is not a porn actress, but is the perfect representation of another stereotype: the Gilda from film noir) is there, leaning against the door, naked and wrapped only in a towel. “Why don’t you come sleep here?”, says Betty. Seconds later the two are having sex. “Is this the first time you’ve done this?”, asks Betty. “I don’t remember”, says Rita.
But we know that this is the first time Betty has done this. And once this is done she will never be able to go back. Rita will have a dream: “There is no band, there is no orchestra“, is what she will say in her sleep. When she wakes up, she will take Betty to a Theater of Illusions called Silence. Just like in The lost road, sex appears here again as a place of truth.
In the theater, an illusionist is on stage repeating the same words: “There is no band. There is no orchestra. It's just illusion“When she hears these words, Betty trembles as if she were possessed or in an earthquake that indicates how her entire universe is collapsing. But David Lynch does not seem very interested in simply making a form of criticism of fetishism by showing that we chase images that, deep down, are illusions. His game is different and much more radical.
It is revealed when a Latin singer takes the place of the illusionist. She will sing a capella an old love song. Even though they have been warned that everything is an illusion, that everything is certainly a playback, Betty and Rita cry compulsively. And even within a universe of simulations and worn-out images, something happens. In the midst of an artificiality that is not afraid to speak its name, an experience of the order of reality finally takes place. This experience is not the revelation of something lost or of an original spontaneity massacred by our industrial world.
She is the strangeness of those who find themselves libidinally investing in ruins, of those who find themselves singing empty words, of those who discover themselves having sex with a perfect image.”It's just an illusion“Yes, I know, but I can’t stop myself from crying. And this is perhaps the great lesson that David Lynch has to teach us: all authentic art knows the expressiveness of the inexpressive and knows that there will only be an experience of reality when we lose the fear of entering a theater of illusions.
But Betty didn't fulfill her destiny, just like Fred Madison. They're nobodies, their road movies they have not gotten anywhere. All Fred thinks about doing is murdering that image that will never be his (Renée) or that Other who seems to have what he would like (Dick Laurent). All Betty Elms wants is to be in the place of “the girl” who will be the support for the phantasmatic reproduction of the same fetishized images. For them, the experience of the real could only be an experience of destruction.
But for David Lynch, it was a sublimation. Because the desire of Fred Madison and Betty Elms remained trapped in the same system of decaying images that imprisoned and constituted it; whereas David Lynch showed that the only possible destiny for us is to learn to build roads out of ruins.
*Vladimir Safatle He is a professor of philosophy at USP. Author, among other books, of Ways of transforming worlds: Lacan, politics and emancipation (Authentic)[https://amzn.to/3r7nhlo]
Notes
[I] An indication of such processes is given to us by David Lynch himself in an interview: “If the dialogue fights against the ambience, then it is perfect” (Interview with David Lynch, Film notebooks, n. 509, January 1997). Principle of inadequacy that will be elevated to the general condition of composition
[ii] As Slavoj Zizek reminds us: “We have a circular situation – first the message is heard but not understood by the hero, then the hero himself uttering the message. In short, the whole film is based on the impossibility of the hero finding himself, as in the famous time-trap scene in science fiction films where the hero, traveling back to the past, finds himself.” (ZIZEK, 2002, p. 122) The ticklish subject, London, Verso, 1999, p. 299).
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