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JSONPassion of David Lynch, The
My scavengings from Martha Nochimson's book
Keywords | Text | Date |
|---|---|---|
| Film: Lynch / Language / Control | Peggy Reavey-- David Lynch's first wife --has said that Lynch is wary of how we are "dictated to by language and things like language" Nochimson: "Lynch acts upon a faith that the illusion of control that language and other cultural structures give us is not as rewarding as losing that illusion and gaining larger, less contingent truths" | 03/09/07 |
| Film: Lynch / Culture / Reality | Nochimson: "[Lynch's work] suggests that, once we understand that we ourselves have created cultural forms and that they only have the meaning we give them, we are free to understand the forces in the universe that are truly larger than we are and how they connect us to a greater reality." (p. 4) | 03/09/07 |
| Film: Lynch / Network / Imagination / Logic | Nochimson: "[F]or Lynch connectedness is what emerges from the tension between reason and the subconscious." (p. 6) | 03/09/07 |
| Film: Cronenberg / Narrative / Reality | Nochimson: "Cronenberg's films... encourage spectators to go through the usual narrative process as if it were pointing toward some meaning despite the constant presence of dark undertones. They then impress on the audience that this process has been one of disconnection from reality." | 03/09/07 |
| Film: Lynch / Empathy / Network / Visual Culture | Nochimson: "Lynchian narrative images promoting empathy reveal a fundamental connectedness among people and the universe. ... As we examine his empathetic image, we will find that he uses the images, both visual and aural, of Hollywood culture, with their mass appeal, to bring the greatest consolation to the greatest number of people." | 03/09/07 |
| Film: Lynch / Control / Imagination / Empathy | Nochimson: "[L]etting go is the form and substance of the Lynch narrative. The spectator is invited to suspend the desire for control by engaging in an empathetic relationship with a protagonist who, as a matter of survival, must learn to permit a channel to the subconscious in order to open the self to the universe." | 03/09/07 |
| Film: Lynch / Women / Imagination | Nochimson: "Lynch's vision of the connection between women and the subconscious causes him to portray his female characters as paradigms of connection -- generally hard-won --with forces beyond rational control." (p. 12) | 03/09/07 |
| Film: Lynch / Reality | David Lynch believes that "our commitment to unreal illusionist realism' is sentimental, to the point where it may be sickening (see The Elephant Man) see Nochimson, 162, 145-6 | 03/14/07 |
| Film: Lynch / Women / Culture | Nochimson argues that Lynch represents femininity as a "joyous, active princile" as opposed to "dread-producing nothingness" "feminine energy is as active as the logic of culture in creating meaning" | 03/14/07 |
| Film: Lynch / Form / Energy | Lynch is itnrigued by images of fire and electricity -- "two of Lynch's favorite images of living form," according to Nochimson | 03/14/07 |
| Film: Lynch / Culture | Nochimson: "The delight in and gratitude to the better energies in popular culture .... are crucial to Lynch's filmmaking." He has a "faith in the extraordinary possibilities within popular culture / Hollywood that he can use for his own vision." | 03/17/07 |
| Film: Lynch / Narrative / Imagination | Nochimson writes that Lynch has "an understanding that narrative can bring us to truth and to each other if it makes us dream [but also that] the logic of narrative can push an artistic expression too close to empty conventions and become a formidable barrier to the dreaming mind." | 03/17/07 |
| Language / Control / Fear | Marthan Nochimson (in her book on David Lynch) writes: "Ferdinand de Saussure proposes that language is an illusion of control to which society desperately clings to avoid perceiving the abyss." (18-19) | 03/17/07 |
| Film: Lynch / Narrative / Will / Imagination | Nochimson implies that Lynch does not think of a narrative "as a conflict to be resolved by the will of the protagonist" and that his films, by contrast, "make narrative a function of both will and the nonrational sensibilities beyond volition." (26) | 03/17/07 |
| Film: Lynch / Reality / Network / Will | Lynch's films depict "the mysteries of coherence despire the reality of cultural instability to control wild forces" and in addition provide for us the "revelation that stabilizing forces far beyond the kinds of controls that human beings can willfully assert are in play and guarantee a viable place for human culture in the universe." [!] | 03/17/07 |
| Film: Lynch / Culture / Suffering / Control / Reality | More on Lynch's cinema as a cinema of "reassurance": Lynch uses "the realm of mass culture to reveal the limits of social structures only to reassure us about how much more is 'out there' and to let us know that what is beyond our control is often a palliative to the suffering that human beings endure from limits they impose." His films disorient us, but only to provide "a refreshed mode of perception that expresses to us a vision that our comfort does not lie exclusively in social forms, for beyond them is not a void ... but abundant larger realities." Nochimson, p. 32 | 03/20/07 |
| Film: Lynch / Identity / Narrative / Ideology | Nochimson: "In a Lynch film, we identify less with the plot and more with the characters' uncanny experiences of the roles they are driven by the plot to play; the narrative is no longer the invisible norm of the movie experience, Indeed, the structure of narrative becomes visible as a set of tensions between invisible urges and visible, rigidly set cultural identities and parameters." (38) Lynch uses stock characters "as poses with which the characters struggle" (38) | 03/20/07 |
| Film: Lynch / Imagination / Culture / Control | Lynch's films use wind as "a visual evocation of free energy ... in tension with the narrow confines of cultural form" (Nochimson) | 03/20/07 |
| Film: Lynch / Will / Body / Imagination | Nochimson 52: "Because of the cultural importance of subduing the subconscious, the body, and anything else that moves of its own accord, loss of will is usually presented ... as a form of defeat or transgression." Lynch, however, "redefines this seeming loss as the potential abundance at the core of our humanity." | 03/20/07 |
| Film: Lynch / Archetype | Two important character archetypes in Lynch's films-- the "seeker" and the "bearer of the secret" Nochimson identifies these on 40-41 | 03/20/07 |
| Film: Lynch / Control / Ethics | Nochimson argues that Lynch's moral universe is not divided between "benign surface" and "malignant depths" as many critics have claimed, but rather that these forces are in fact two different faces of a single "over-controlling rationality" Nochimson sees Blue Velvet as a "less evolved" film in Lynch's canon, for it is not fully able to "depict the interpenetration" of these two modes Evil, in Lynch's films, is "a toxic form of control" but Nochimson also points out that the quote-unquote "good" community has "parameters" that are equally "constricting" (103) | 03/20/07 |
| Film: Lynch / Adolescents | Nochimson claims that Lynch's films map adolescence as "a potential time of vision" (104) | 03/20/07 |
| Film: Lynch / Performance / Music / Imagination | Nochimson writes that the "popular stage" is "always magic" in Lynch's films, a place "raised beyond the reductions of ordinary life by the kernel of the collective nonrational" | 03/20/07 |
| Film: Lynch / Nature / Language / Logic | "[Lynch] thrives on the tension between the two major incompatibilities in his work: nature, with its unseen balances and its mysterious, nonconscious economies; and conscious culture marked by the reductive linearities of language, with its fierce logical coherence." Nochimson, 201 | 03/20/07 |
| Film: Lynch / Narrative | Nochimson, 201 Lynch believes in "the viability and the importance of narrative form, albeit as a form mitigated by insurgent energies ... [T]he magic of story form emerges in Lynch's dreamlike narratives as perfectly compatible with an art that can in some ways shed the will. ... [Lynch] has fastened onto everything in narrative that defeats its logic wiht just as much enthusiasm as he has entertained the rigid form that narrative asserts. In his hands, the collision of story form with formally indigestible elements does not threaten the integrity of narrative." | 03/20/07 |
| Film: Lynch / Technology: Alphabet / Language / Form / Culture / Reality | In Lynch's short film "The Alphabet" a girl recites the ABCs and this is presented as her "induction into social order [which] wounds something in her that we cannot see" the film functions as an explanation "that culturally derived forms cannot contain either the human sensibility or the whole of reality" (Nochimson) | 03/20/07 |
| Film: Lynch / Form / Reality | Nochimson writes that the strange starkness of objects as they sometimes appear in Lynch's films should remind viewers "that they are looking at constructed forms with no organic relationship to reality." (166) | 03/20/07 |
| Film: Lynch / Form / Narrative / Control | Nochimson's summary of Lynch's early films: "Form is alphabetical and intrudes upon us. Form is plastic and wells up from within us. Conflict is inevitable. Narrative is everywhere. Resolved closure is impossible. Rather, narrative is the representation of dynamic tensions in specific material situations with specific cultural forms. ... We need to be aware of what we control and what we don't control to understand the human condition." | 03/20/07 |
| Film: Lynch / Film: Hitchcock / Film: Welles / Narrative / Imagination | Martha Nochimson claims that Lynch, Hitchcock and Welles all "experimented with storytelling that de-emphasized the controlling narrative line ... in courting the powers and pleasures of the subconscious in narrative." |