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ECHOES
OF
INDISCERNIBLITY
© 2002
Contents
ECHO
0
The Main Man
ECHO
1
Deleuze 1
ECHO
2
Deleuze 2
ECHO
3
Entering
Indiscernibility
Baudrillard
Hollywood
Bibliography
NOTE:
There is a video to accompany
this text.
The titles Echo 0, 1, 2, 3 &
Entering Indiscernibility are each accompanied by the relevant clip. I
cannot provide this video over the internet, but hopefully, it is clear
which scenes they refer to...
”The entire film
performs as a choreographed dance of memory:
past, present and
future”
Gargett(2002) – pg 2
ECHO
0
IMMEDIATELY,
we are thrown into another world. A frantic mesh of indiscernible layers
appears before us. Dancing to and fro, couples twirl and spin in and
around one another in kaleidoscopic abstraction. As the frenzy heightens,
a superimposition of an illuminated young girl named Betty melts into
view, flashes before us. The crowd cheers. Lit, starlit, she gazes high
in anticipation of wonders to come.
The
scene flickers; the luminosity retracts to reveal a more dreary view.
Now we see through someone else’s eyes; we hear a muted breathing as
we lay wearily on the crumpled bedsheets before us.
These
are the establishing shots of the film Mulholland Drive. Establishing!?
Maybe that wasn’t the best word. For already what we’ve established
is an indiscernibility. As the camera lays us down upon the bedsheets,
we step in to the possibility that anything proceeding this could
be a dream.
Welcome
to the fantastical phantasms of David Lynch.
”…like
Jimmy Stewart from Mars…”
Rodley(1997) - pg xii
The
Main Man
David
Lynch is an internationally renowned film director from the small
city of Missoula, Montana. His resumé to date includes films such as Dune,
Blue Velvet, Lost Highway and the cult hit TV series, Twin Peaks.
In 2001, he released his latest film, Mulholland Drive. A veritable
dream of a story charting the demise of a young girl’s aspirations in
Hollywood. Like much of Lynch’s previous work, his non-linear
narrative structure and general penchant for the enigmatic lead to cries
of incoherence. Many a critic slammed their fists in confusion. Many an
audience sat and smirked at what they regarded as being positively ’abysmal’.
I, like many others, sat in awe, revelling in the wonders of
bewilderment. I eagerly awaited a second viewing and reserved a copy of
the video before it was even on sale!
But why
is it that I can sit and revel in something that others sat and retched?
Is the
film really that incoherent? Where does its incoherence lie and
why, if at all, would a film director desire to make a film that was incoherent?
One of
his most notoriously confusing works to date has to be Lost Highway.
In this
film, half way through, the main character metamorphasizes into someone
completely different and a whole new story begins. Then toward the end,
that story links up to the first and we get lost in a perplexing web of
circularities.
When
asked about his desire to confuse people, he said: -
”It needs to be a certain
way, and it’s not to confound, it’s to feel the mystery. Mystery is
good, confusion is bad, and there’s a big difference between the two.
…Some things in life are not
that understandable, but when things in films are that way,people become
worried. And yet they are, in some way, understandable. ”
Rodley(1997) - pg227
Lynch
believes that we do all understand his films, he merely believes
that they operate on a very different level, on a much more subconscious
level. To him, watching a film is about the experience, about being
drawn into the same strange world that he himself is drawn into. If we
or him knew exactly where that was, it wouldn’t be the same…
”It’s a dangerous thing to
say what a picture is. If things get too specific, the dream stops.
There are things that happen sometimes that opens a door that lets you
soar out and feel a bigger thing.Like when the mind gets involved in a
mystery. It’s a thrilling feeling”
Gargett (2002)- pg4
Hence,
he takes it a step at a time, working in the most intuitive of ways. In
order to create a truly enigmatic and mysterious story, he lets the
puzzle remain unsolved within his own mind.
”(ideas) are just allowed to
kind of swim. You’re not subject to people judging them or anything.
Thet just swim, and you don’t really worry about what they mean. Its
all feelings: it feels right and you know intuitively what it’s doing,
and you work from that level. It somehow turns out to be an honest thing
if you stay on that level, and just let those ideas swim around, down
where you capture them.”
Chion(1995) - pg.122
Working
in this way, he expresses his innermost thoughts and creates an
unsolvable mystery. Unsolvable because the ideas are spontaneous. In his
book Man and His Symbols, Carl Jung notes: -
”the sign is always less than
the object it represents, while a symbol always stands for something
more than its obvious and immediate meaning. Symbols, moreover, are
natural and spontaneous products. …No one can take a more or less
rational thought, reached as a logical conclusion or by deliberate
intent, and then give it ”symbolic” form. No matter what fantastic
trappings one may put upon an idea of this kind , it will still remain a
sign, linked to the conscious thought behind it, not a symbol that hints
at something not yet known. In dreams, symbols occur spontaneously, for
dreams happen and are not invented; ”
Jung(1997) - pg116
In
creating a film with the most intuitive of methods, he lets the film happen.
The script for him is simply a blueprint, it’s the sensual marriage of
images and sounds that creates the experience. Creating something in
this fashion means there will always be loose ends, symbols that hint at
something not yet known…as Lynch desires…
People
on the web have spent hours of time trying in vain to decipher the many
strands of Mulholland Drive. In the end, you have to submit that there
simply is no one right interpretation. Instead there are a plurality of
interpretations, each one correct in its own ways.
OK
though, so its not confusing; simply mysterious. But why and how does
Lynch make it this way? It may well simply be an intuitive desire, but
where might that come from? Why does Lynch desire to make things
mysterious?
There
are many different ways of creating mystery, but he does it in a very
specific fashion. Many films create mystery, but few if any in the same
way as Lynch.
What
might it be that drives these intuitions? Does Lynch himself have a
troubled splintered psyche that he’s projecting on to the canvas of
film?
Well…it
seems not. All reports lead to the opposite. Of him being a well
grounded individual. So what is it he’s projecting?
Lets
take a look...
Following the establishing shots,
we bear witness to a car crash. A raven haired woman emerges from the
burning wreckage and stumbles down the hillside toward the shimmering
lights of Hollywood. The next day, she sneaks into an apartment of a
woman named Ruth who is about to set off on her travels. Ruth is
Betty’s aunt, the girl we’ve already seen as an illumination in ECHO
0. The raven-haired woman falls asleep underneath the kitchen table.
ECHO 1 is the scene that follows…
ECHO
1
I’d
like to draw attention to four elements of this scene.
Firstly,
the sandwiching of the scene between two shots. One before, of the
raven-haired woman falling asleep, and one after, of the raven-haired
woman still asleep.
Secondly,
Peter Deming’s camera work that makes it seem as if we are
hovering above them like some sort of ethereal spirit.
Thirdly,
the seemingly bad acting of the dreamer. You don’t know
quite how to take him…there’s something very uncanny about the way
he speaks and acts.
Fourthly,
the double-take the dreamer makes when his friend goes to the
counter and the accompanying silence of his friend’s voice.
The
first three all seem to indicate that this scene may be a dream.
Things aren’t quite in line with our perceptions of the way they
should be. Showing you this clip as I have, this may seem fairly obvious.
But, in the film, you barely notice; the scene seems almost superfluous.
A mere self-indulgence on the part of Lynch.
However,
I see it as one of the key scenes, as the first major echo of
indiscernibility.
You
cannot say whether it is definitely the raven-haired woman’s dream or
not. Even with the floaty camera work and the uncanny acting, it’s too
subtle an implication. It’s indiscernible.
The
fourth element makes us question if the dream is happening there and
then, another subtle blurring of their reality. You cannot say whether
the man is imagining the appearance of the monster or is actually having
the dream for a third time.
Is it a
dream of the man within a dream of the raven-haired woman within a dream
of the film? Is it all real? Is some of it real and some of it a dream?
We do
not know; it’s indiscernible.
Deleuze
1
In his
fine writings on time in cinema, Gilles Deleuze talks at length about
the relationship between the actual image and the virtual image. He
talks about the nature of an actual-virtual image. That is, an image
which is both actual and virtual at the same time.
”There is a formation of an
image with two sides, actual and virtual. It is as if an image in a
mirror, a photo or a postcard came to life, assumed independence and
passed into the actual, even if this meant that the actual image
returned into the mirror and resumed its place in the postcard or photo,
following a double movement of liberation and capture.”
Deleuze(1989) – pg 68
We see
this happen in ECHO 1 when the monster appears from behind the
wall. It is at this point that the dream enters into what we percieve as
reality. The dream becomes reality and in turn, reality becomes a dream.
The virtual becomes actual, and in turn, the actual virtual. Deleuze
calls this process ’reciprocal presupposition’.
He
defines the point of indiscernibility between the actual and the virtual
as the ’crystal-image’.
The appearance of the monster is
a crystal image.
”In fact,there is no virtual
which does not become actual in relation to the actual, the latter
becoming virtual through the same relation: it is a place and its
obverse which are reversible…The indiscernibility of the real and the
imaginary, or of the present and the past, of the actual and the virtual,
is definitely not produced in the head or the mind, it is the objective
characteristic of certain images which are by nature double.”
Deleuze(1989) – pg 69
Later,
he further defines the virtual image as ’pure recollection’; it
exists outside of consciousness as an ’objective illusion’. Just as,
if there was a chair in the next room, any recollection of it would not
be the chair itself. It exists independently. For Deleuze, it’s
actualisation within our consciousness is only a virtual virtual
image, an impure recollection. The chair itself exists as a virtual
image before we recollect it. Hence, the circuits of relation between
the present and the past (or real and imaginary) always refer
simultaneously to the immediate ’small internal circuit’ of actual
and virtual and the broader, deeper, virtual circuits that they
create within themselves.
”The
crystal-image has these two aspects: internal limit of all the relative
circuits, but also outer-most, variable and reshapable envelope, at the
edges of the world, beyond even moments of the world. The little
crystalline seed and the vast crystallizable universe:everything is
included in the capacity for expansion of the collection constituted by
the seed and the universe.”
Deleuze(1989) – pg81
Soon after the scene at Winkies (ECHO
1), we are introduced to Betty.
We see her arrive in Hollywood, rubbing her hands in glee. She smiles
and says
’Oh…I can’t believe it…’
in the most fairytale of fashions.
She arrives at the apartment to
find the raven-haired woman taking a shower. The raven-haired woman
takes the name Rita from a poster in the bathroom, and lets Betty think
she is a friend of Aunt Ruths’. But when Ruth phones later on, she has
to admit ’I don’t know who I am!’. They search her purse to find
out her real name but find only wads of cash and a blue key. (Rita)
remembers the name Mulholland Drive, and then after a little more
detective work, the name Diane Selwyn.
Meanwhile, we have been
introduced to Mr.Roke. A small man who sits in a strange chair in a
large room surrounded by curtains. He seems to take on the role of the
’Godfather’, an all-powerful all-seeing eye. He listens in on a
board meeting between (what appear to be)two of his henchmen and a young
film director, Adam Kesher. When Adam refuses to cast the girl the
henchmen say he should, they tell him it is no longer his film. He gets
angry and beats up their limousine with a golf club.
Things in his life begin to go
wrong. He finds his wife in bed with another man and is suddenly
declared bankrupt. His secretary advises him to go see the ’Cowboy’.
The Cowboy persuades him in would be to his advantage to cast the girl
the henchmen desire.
ECHO 2 is the scene that
follows…
ECHO
2
This
scene is another, subtler twist on our relationship with reality. This
time we are told that things are not how they first seem. What can be
seen one way can also be seen another.
As we
enter the first scene, the camera refrains from letting us see Rita’s
script. Only once a few lines have passed and we’ve dipped far enough
inside their world does the camera retract and show us they are
rehearsing. Once more, we step from actual to virtual. But, hang on! Why,
the very fact that they are acting…we don’t even step into a pure
actuality! It’s a virtual actuality!
The
second version of the script holds a mirror to the first. Instead of
passing from actual to virtual, we now pass from virtual to actual. The
scene becomes so real that we are unsure whether Betty is even
acting any more. The director even nudges us into the situation with the
words ’…don’t play it for real until it gets real…’.
As if
any minute now, it will get real.
The
script passes from actuality to virtuality and back again in a
never-ending internal reverberation of reciprocal presuppositions.
Deleuze
2
When
Deleuze talks of the crystal image, he explains it in terms of a circuit
between the actual and the virtual. He explains that the crystalline
circuit is composed of three phases. The actual-virtual, the opaque-limpid
and the seed-milieu. The actual-virtual exchange has already been
described. He tells us that the opaque-limpid is an expression of their
exchange.
”When
the virtual image becomes actual. It is then visible and limpid, as in
the mirror or the solidity of finished crystal. But the actual image
becomes virtual in its turn, referred elsewhere, invisible, opaque and
shadowy, like a crystal barely dislodged from the earth. The
actual-virtual couple thus immediately extends into the opaque-limpid,
the expression of their exchange.”
Deleuze
– pg 70
At one
point, he describes the opaque-limpid relationship as being like the
relation of a ship above water to it’s hull beneath. The merry sailors
and luminous captain above in the world of limpidity; the engineers
stoking the world of opacity below.
He uses
the concept in a very aesthetic, romanticised manner.
The
seed-milieu relationship can be defined as the introduction of a new
entity or a change to an environment. He describes this with a scene of
two men fighting, frozen in the mud as the sun rises.
Examples
of the phases in the crystalline circuit can be explored in ECHO 2:-
When
Betty accepts the hand on her buttock, the whole sequence(both
rehearsals) enters a crystalline circuit. The primary seed
to the circuit is the hand invited into the milieu of their
encounter. As this happens, Betty becomes immersed in opacity;
the sleazy opacity of her relationship with ’dad’s best friend’;
the opacity of the sudden intensity with which they play the scene. The
opacity which injects all of Betty’s previous scenes with a
newly revitalised limpidity. In excavating the one extremity we
cannot help but excavate the other. Betty emerges as a beacon of naïvety,
an exquisite holler in the acoustics of indiscernibility.
Meanwhile,
an equivalence is illuminated. The fearful opacities of Rita’s past
coalesce with the sleazy opacity of Betty’s virtual present; the
absolute limpidity of Rita’s amnesia merges with the fresh excrescence
of Betty’s limpidity; and together they form a delightful set of
juxtapositions. The marriage of an actual opacity and a virtual opacity
juxtaposed against the marriage of a virtual limpidity and an actual
limpidity.
After the audition, the casting
agents whisk Betty off to a film set to get a part she would die for.
They watch Adam Kesher cast the blond-haired Camilla as requested. At
which point Betty skidaddles to accompany Rita in her search for Diane
Selwyn.
They
reach the apartment and find Diane dead. Rita, in an effort to cast her
past aside, cuts her hair. Betty says ’I know what you have to do, but
let me do it’, and gives her a blonde wig. She begins to look very
similar to Betty. That evening, the two of them make love and Betty
tells Rita she’s in love with her. In the middle of the night, Rita
wakes from a dream and tells Betty they must go somewhere. They go to
Club Silencio. ECHO 3 is the clip that follows...
ECHO
3
Before
we consider the scene in Club Silencio, lets take a look at what
happened before. Rita, ashamed of her newly discovered past, cuts her
hair. Betty offers to help. But surprisingly,
Betty gives her a blonde wig. As she dons the wig, Betty remarks ’...you
look like someone else...’. Rita begins to look like Betty. The
wig is Rita’s virtual initiation into Betty. A sort of foreplay
before they make love and truly unite in the literal marriage of the
actual and the virtual. That is the actual Betty and the virtual Betty.
It’s the ultimate herald to the climax of the film. The poles of
indiscernibility can be brought no closer together. We are coming closer
to the source of the echo.
The
theatre can be seen as an amalgamation of what was suggested in the
previous echoes:-
As a
parallel to ECHO 1, we see three distinct crossings of reality. The man
on stage disappears in a puff of smoke; Betty shakes like a character
from Scooby Doo; The blue box appears from nowhere.
As a
parallel to ECHO 2, we are told that things are not as they seem.
Literally, the man on stage proclaims ’It is ALL an illusion...’.
This ices another layer on the cake of indiscernibility. Does he mean
the theatrical set up we see before us, or the film as a whole?
We are
told it is all virtual. Yet, sure enough, that is cast
into indiscernibility when Rebecca Del Rio draws us back into an
illusion of reality.
When
she faints, we realise the illusion is within ourselves. We are the
one’s that percieve and hence create the illusion. This is not an
objective illusion. Objectively, we know we have sound and image as
seperate entities. It’s only in our heads that we percieve the
illusion. Now we are brought in to coalescence with Betty and
Rita in the harrowing thought that we too are limpid!
So is
sounded the final echo of indiscernibility
Betty and Rita leave the
theatre to find the blue key to open the blue box. Rita reaches to get
the key, and as she does, Betty mysteriously disappears. Rita calls her
but when she hears no answer continues regardless. She opens the box and
disappears into a black void. The box drops to the floor and we pan up
to see Ruth return to the apartment. Ruth looks about and we pan back
down to see the box too has mysteriously vanished.
All change. We now go to the
cowboy who is telling the dead Diane Selwyn its time to wake up. Diane
awakes and we realise that she is now Betty. Or at least a character
played by Naomi Watts(Betty). We then discover a multitude of things
about Diane’s life. Diane was having a love affair with Camilla(who is
played by Laura Elena Harring - Rita). Camilla has said it can’t
continue. Then later, at a dinner party announces her engagement to Adam
Kesher, the director, who’s mother is Coco, Betty’s landlady. At
that same dinner party, we see a collection of characters who have
featured elsewhere in the film. Diane is jealous of Camilla and hires a
hitman to kill her. Who we’ve also already met earlier on in the film.
He tells her that when the job is done she will find a blue key.
The ending sequence features
the Winkies monster fiddling with the blue box, which he puts in a brown
paper bag and drops on the floor. Out of the bag trundle the two elderly
people we saw accompany Betty on her arrival in Hollywood. Then we
switch to Diane’s appartment where the elderly people chase her to her
bed where she shoots herself.
Entering Indiscernibility is
one of the clips following the scene where Diane awakes and we realise
that she is now Betty.
I’ve included it as a
snapshot of the general chaos that ensues in the second part of the
film. Please play the final clip now:
”Mulholland Drive’s visual and
sound leitmotivs and its system of alternating plots delays the
emergence of something substantial so far that it never arrives. However,
one may feel that the subject of the film lies precisely in the chasm,
which is opened up by that very delaying mechanism.”
Gargett(2002), pg 6
Entering indiscernibility
Having
emerged from the wounding illusions of Club Silencio, we are suddenly
sucked into a void and spat out into a well of indiscernibility. With
Betty disappearing only to reappear inside what was previously a rotting
corpse, all referentials of reality are dissolved. We become frozen in a
stasis of indiscernibility, exorcistically crystallized. The only
platform we now have to stand on is the evanescent present; our reliance
on the scenes before us continuing within the reassuring bounds of
temporal linearity.
In
minutes, even that is shattered. Within the clip shown, Lynch liquidates
time; blending past, present and future in a Molotovian cocktail of
confusion.
Pummelled
and punctured with crystalline possibilities, virtuals slash violently
at actuals, actuals quake and break in a schlupping of phantasmagoric
animosity.
Our
platform has disintegrated. There’s no doubt about it.
We’ve
entered the chasmic realms of indiscernibility.
BAUDRILLARD
In his
book, Simulations and Simulacra, Jean Baudrillard charts the
disintegration of reality. He defines it within the ’orders of
simulacra’.
BEFORE SIMULACRA
”it is the reflection of a
profound reality.”
He says
that to begin with(pre-15th century), we had signs which
represented a set reality. These signs would accord to things like
social status, fixed references of our being. We were born into these
social rankings and were punished for the use of signs outside our
dedicated realm of being. A slave boy was born a slave boy and would
never be anything but a slave boy. If he paraded around in fancy
clothing , he’d be in big trouble with his master.
1ST
ORDER SIMULACRA
”it masks and denatures a
profound reality.”
Then,
with the beginnings of the Renaissance, the strict definitions of class
began to disintegrate, and hence, so did these fixed references. Signs
could now indicate more flexible referentials. The common man could get
away with wearing a top hat without being ostracized or punished. Signs
began to signify. Fashion was born. People could pretend they were
something else.
2ND
ORDER SIMULACRA
”it
masks the absence of a profound reality”
With
the Industrial Revolution, mass-production was born. Now signs were
mass-produced and began to signify themselves as symbols of money and
power. They began to bear less relation to their origin
3RD
ORDER SIMULACRA
”it has no relation to any
reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum. ”
Now,
Baudrillard believes reality has disintegrated. The signs now have no
meaning whatsoever due to a liquidation of referentials.
The
procession of simulacra can be traced within the context of Mulholland
Drive.
We
enter the film with an image of the first order. The scene shown in ECHO
0 of the camera laying down upon the sheets is a basic perversion of
reality. We can now no longer say for certain whether we are in a dream
or a reality. The scene masks our basic sense of reality.
The
second order is developed within the echoes. As each echo sounds, they
begin to relate to one another. We saw this in the theatre. The
crossings of reality referred back to previous crossings. Our echoes
grow stronger; they begin to form a self-referential entity of their own,
losing their sense of origin.
The
third order or pure simulacrum manifests itself as we enter
indiscernibility. We lose all touch with reality. All referentials are
liquidated.
”Come
on, it’ll be just like in the movies...”
Betty persuading Rita in
Mulholland Drive
HOLLYWOOD
”…the American city seems to have stepped
right out of the movies. To grasp its secret, you should not, then,
begin with the city and move inwards to the screen; you should begin
with the screen and move outwards to the city.”
Baudrillard (1988), pg
56
Baudrillard describes
America as being the real cinema. The real cinematic experience. So
immersed have they become within their own images that they now are
their own images. Hollywood is the epitome of this. The epitome of
simulated America, and as such the ideal choice for the subject of a
film like Mulholland Drive.
Mulholland Drive bares
naked this pure simulacrum. The recurrent reverberations of a film
within a film that’s set in a land which is a film...
”Ghost towns, ghost people. The whole place has
the same air of obsolescence about it as Sunset or Hollywood Boulevard.
You come out feeling as though you have been put through some infantile
simulation test. Where is the cinema? It is all around you outside, all
over the city, that marvellous, continuous performance of films and
scenarios. Everywhere but here.”
This is the
echo of indiscernibility. The film gushes indiscernibilities in all
directions, spraying decay upon origin after origin. The climatic
explosion of the real in the theatre, breaking out of the screen into
the limpid sweat of our minds; the reciprocal presupposition of our
reality imploding, entering the screen, the final devouring of
referentiality.
Bibliography
• Baudrillard,
Jean (1988) America
- Verso
• Baudrillard,
Jean (1994) Simulacra and Simulation
– The
University of Michigan
• Chion, Michel
(1995) David Lynch
– British Film
Institute
• Deleuze, Gilles
(1989) Cinema 2 – The Time-Image
•
Gargett, Adrian (2002) Perfect Ghosts : Mulholland Drive
-
www.disinfo.com
• Horrocks, Chris
(1999) Introducing Baudrillard
– Icon
Books Ltd.
• Hughes,
David (2001) The Complete Lynch
-
Virgin
•
Jung, Carl (1997) Man and His Symbols
-
Mass market paperback
• Lechte, John
(1994) Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers
- Routledge
• Powell,
Jim (1998) Postmodernism for Beginners
– Writers
and Readers Ltd.
• Rodley,
Chris (1997) Lynch on Lynch
• Ruch, Alan.B.
(2002) ”No Hay Banda”
- www.themodernword.com/mulholland_drive.html
• Taubin, Amy
(2001) Film Comment magazine – Sept/Oct
• Zizek, Slavoj
(1999) The Matrix-The Two sides of Perversion
–http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:gQx33B16SVYC:www.nettime.org/
nettime.w3archive/199912/msg00019.html
Filmography
•Lynch, David
(2001) Mulholland Drive
– Studio Canal
•Resnais, Alain
(1962) Last year in Marienbad
- Fox Lorber
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