Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 7 No. 7, March 2003
Daniel Coffeen
This is Cinema
The Pleated Plenitude of the Cinematic Sign in David Lynch's _Mulholland Dr._
Elusive Signs At the crash scene, two
cops look on. They do not seem terribly bright; their stare
is neither intent nor contemplative. One says to the other,
holding an evidence bag: 'Could be unrelated.' And then:
'Could be someone's missing.' Signs proliferate: keys,
glances, a purse, a midget, a moustache, a golf club,
sunglasses, fire, a hair-do, regurgitated espresso, a
cowboy. It's as if every prop is trying to tell us
something. But meaning eludes us: the paths assumed by these
signs follow unheard-of laws. The police will do us no good
here. The consummation of these signs remains obscured as
the viewer remains on edge, at the juncture of
signification, the sign apparently disappearing at the
precise moment of its enunciation. As the cop says: 'Could
be someone's missing.' In this world, order is
construed according to a peculiar cinematic sense. And while
it could be that someone is missing, it seems more likely
that there is no someone per se, hence no one is missing.
Here, signifiers slide along the texture of celluloid so
that when one follows a sign expecting to find a stable
referent, one finds something missing. We are therefore not meant
to decode the film. If the viewer looks closely or a second
time, the film will not whisper its revelations. This is not
a puzzle in which all the varied pieces will eventually fall
into place; this is not allegory. Nor is it a whodunit. If
we continue to look on as Lynch's cops (following clues that
will lead to an answer), we will be confounded. (This seems
to be how many people watch this film; peruse reader reviews
at, say, the Internet
Movie Database,
and you'll see what I mean.) We should have suspected.
The title, _Mulholland Dr._, cannot quite be spoken: it is a
visual glyph. There is a different language spoken here, a
thoroughly cinematic language, with its own acrobatics of
the sign. Try to say the title as you normally would and
you'll find yourself slurring. This is not an irony that
slips behind the back of the viewer only to signify once out
of sight, a private joke. This is not the matter of a
private semiotics. No, the director holds nothing back.
There are secrets but they are not the secrets of the
filmmakers; the whispers remain inaudible to all:
*Silencio*. The significance of _Mulholland Dr._ will be
revealed indirectly, in a kind of articulate silence, like
Kierkegaard's incognito Jesus. [1] The camera work equally
belies our identification with any mode of knowing. Shots
are rarely expositional; the camera is not neutral. But
neither does it follow a perspective, a line of sight --
conceptual or subjective -- with which we can identify. The
camera seems to be neither participant nor observer. Just as
the camera seems to mimic a subjective eye, following a
character's line of sight allowing the viewer his own line
of sight, the camera shifts. The shots inside Winkie's
diner, for instance, are dizzying. At first, the camera
follows the conversation. But then it nestles behind one
character's neck, before moving slurredly across the table,
just off-kilter, following a line of sight that is neither
the character's nor the director's nor any idea or plot or
concept or genre that we can identify. There is a looking,
and there are signs, which at once entangle, seduce, and
elude us. This is not the work of
*differance*. [2] These signs signify; there is
neither lack nor deferment. This is what makes Lynch's films
so creepy, so menacing: someone, something, somewhere
understands these elusive signs. For Derrida, there is
nothing but play because there will never have been a there
there. But for Lynch there is a knowing, a knowing that is
completely different, thoroughly alien. His films are
essentially paranoid. In Lynch's world, we are all K -- but
we're also L, M, Z, and A. While not drifting within
the play of *differance*, nor are we in Merleau-Ponty's
phenomenological sign as gesture. For Merleau-Ponty,
signification is a metonymic process: the signifier is
continuous with the signified. Together, they forge a
gesture or sign-affect. 'The gesture', Merleau-Ponty writes,
'*does not make me think* of anger, it is anger itself'.
[3] The gesture does not point to or designate
something which is over there -- a thought or thing or
event; the gesture is a distribution of the physical and the
meta-physical -- bodies, breath, notions, concepts, ideas.
The sign qua gesture is not a signifying function but is
itself a moment, a component, of the
meaning-event. We find such gestures at
work in Wong Kar-Wei's exquisite _Chungking Express_.
_Chungking Express_ is a stream of varied affects, a
cinematic stroll happening in the now, more or less bereft
of signs. For Wong Kar-Wei, filmic language insists; it does
not point elsewhere. In Wong's films, there is a present
ambience of active parts. As Deleuze might say, Wong Kar-Wei
makes film stutter, makes it slide along its own enunciative
trajectory, splaying its speech along the planes of its own
tongue. [4] We witness the dynamics of affect rather
than an acrobatics of the sign. If _Chungking Express_
proffers undulating planes of vibratory immanence, gestures
that happen now, _Mulholland Dr._ proffers the uncertainty
of a signifier that's always looking over its shoulder for
an obscured signified. For all the twists and
turns, _Mulholland Dr._ is not the realm of Hitchcock. As
Deleuze argues, for Hitchcock the event arranges characters
into a certain dynamic that is cinematic production.
[5] Take _Rope_: the opening murder informs every
exchange at the dinner party. The tension of the film turns
on the manner in which the murder inflects the respective
characters and their relations. For Hitchcock, it is
precisely this economy of events and psychological subjects
that forges the realm of film. But for Lynch, the
relationship between characters and events is less clear. In
some sense, _Mulholland Dr._ is nothing but events, events
without characters, nothing but the relentless assembling of
signs. As these are events without cause and hence without
effect, Lynch does not allow us recourse to psychoanalysis.
There is no deep-rooted ambivalence, no burbling id, no stew
of explanation. Hitchcock enjoys
psychology. To him, film is the mechanics of the psyche --
often absurd, irrational, erroneous but always explainable
as he remains within the confines of the psychoanalytic
subject (the finale of _Psycho_). For Lynch, despite the
persistence of dreams, the dreamwork will not suffice. The
very possibility of a character remains dubious: the signs
that constitute this or that character will never be
realized once and for all. Lynch's characters are like any
other Lynchian prop: signifiers that slide, pointing this
way and that, following beguiling paths of
movement. There's not even a psyche
to locate. At the presumed center of the film, a center that
will never have been a center, are two women, each with
multiple names, with varying amalgamations of signs each
with a different organizing mode. One, stripped of memory,
assumes a cinematic signifier, 'Rita', injured and
vulnerable starlet, before transforming into Camilla Rhodes,
manipulative diva. 'Camilla' is itself borrowed from a
blonde who exists only as a headshot, an actress already in
character as a 50s singer, and as a lesbian temptress. A
local economy of signs in which signifiers and signifieds
slip and slide and double and borrow and swap: an elaborate
tropology. The other -- what do I
call her? Betty? Diane? -- is clearly doubled once as
signifiers slide along the surface of the film and she moves
from doe-eyed naif to drug addled wash-out, scorned and
vengeful. But this is not the first time we witness her
signs sliding. In what is probably the film's most poignant
moment, we see her transform before our eyes from naif to
sexpot as she auditions for a film within the film. But she
will never have been centered; her signifiers are in
perpetual flux, alternately accelerating and slowing. From
the getgo, she is acting: there is no 'real' Betty or Diane.
'Diane' is visually, then aurally, consumed at Winkie's only
to be spit back out of this cinematic engine. Identities do
not stay still as signifiers and signifieds slide along the
sleek surface of the film as the interiority of the subject
-- or of any object for that matter -- is thoroughly
infiltrated by the cinematic, splayed along a tape that is
pervasive. As we're told: 'It's all tape.' Lynch's characters are
quite different from those of Wong Kar-Wei. In _Chungking
Express_ and _Fallen Angels_, characters function as present
affects, assemblages of force, local coherences of color,
mood, style. Bereft of depth, they move through a cinematic
space that is dynamic, local, insistent, playful. In
_Mulholland Dr._, on the other hand, characters are
assemblages not of force but of signs. As the film moves, so
does the constitution or coherence of these characters, as
they trade, borrow, swap, lose, and steal signs. A Mobius Sign The sign is predicated on
a movement between here and there. But where is there? The
presence of this 'there' haunts film (just as it perhaps
haunts all media, including the talking, writing person):
where is the there of the camera? With whose eye does the
camera watch? The cult of the director
allows for a ready answer: why, it's David Lynch! But as
_Mulholland Dr._ makes violently clear, the director is not
the one in control. Films tend to turn to meta-cinematic
means as a way of stabilizing this decentered production,
this roaming, disembodied eye. Plot, character, genre,
morality all guarantee that a knowing eye is in control.
Who's watching? Whose eye is this we're seeing
through? Why, it's a middle-class
white love affair; a comedy of errors that resolves itself;
a farce; a tale of people being people. It's a benevolent,
honest, omniscient eye. Or it's the turbulence of the scene
infecting, inflecting, the camera: everything's shaky in
this love affair, including the camera. Think of the opening
sequence of Woody Allen's _Husbands and Wives_. The avant-garde proffers
other options. For instance, the camera is a subjectivity,
perhaps not the director's but it is an eye with a
perspective or the possibility of a perspective even if not
conceptually enunciated -- Bergman's _Persona_. Or else the
camera becomes itself, not a subjectivity but a medium. I'm
thinking of Michael Snow's _Wavelength_, a continuous 45
minute zoom in, at the end of which sits an image of a wave.
_Wavelength_ is cinema as formal exercise; it maps a
possible movement of the camera as a perceptive vehicle
while simultaneously revealing, if not parodying, a basic
premise of narrative: the climax. Lynch will have none of
this. The camera in _Mulholland Dr._ is neither expositional
nor subjective. Nor is the medium the message: when film
speaks, it is already inflected with its own history, with
its own style. Turn the camera on and there will already be
something there. For Lynch, film is the totality of cinema,
its history, its formal limits and freedoms, its texture,
its syntactics. A tale of sorts is told but the camera is
not telling this tale. But then who, or what, is
watching? As the two women enter Silencio in the presumed
cover of night, who is it that follows them, as if from a
distance, only to quicken its pace beyond a human pale? Who,
or what, moves across the table at Winkie's? What
perspective is it that looks outside the limousine to a
world of dizzying micro-cuts, as if vision were itself
perforated and deformed? We discover the answer
inside amidst the din of silence; an odd answer, yes, but an
answer, an answer that will have already set in motion these
bizarre acrobatics of the sign. 'There is no band,' we are
told, 'it's all a recording. It's all tape.' The answer is:
cinema. Cinema is watching. (This is explicitly played out
in _Lost Highway_ as a video tape, shot from an impossible
perspective, is laid at the doorstep.) The line separating
the real from the recorded has always already been erased.
The camera captures what has already been recorded. There is
no off-screen presence that either assures or undermines our
mastery as film watchers and filmmakers. On the contrary,
the presence is precisely *on* screen: it is the screen
itself that watches, the screen folded back on itself, at
once watching and watched, recorded and recording, a
cinematic circuit of endless mobility, a mobility that
wrinkles the sign. _Mulholland Dr._ is not a
film about film; it is a film *of* film. This is film
telling its own tale, in its own language (according to
Lynchian logic). The camera proclaims this: a shot from on
high surveys the 'Hollywood' sign but from an impossible
perspective that is neither of a person nor of an omniscient
narrator. The shot is not stable; the camera moves, catching
the sign in its sight, an announcement on the go. This same impossible and
seemingly discontinuous perspective repeats itself, moving
over Hollywood and Los Angeles, over the city of dreams.
These are not scene setting shots that then hone down on the
subjects. It is a mobius revelation as the film twists
around to speak itself. This is film revealing itself,
exposing itself before our eyes. Simultaneously, it is
cinema presiding over its jurisdiction: itself. The *there* of film, the
there of the sign, will never have been off-screen. These
signs will not consummate behind our backs. They may be
obscured for the present moment by the movement of the film
as it winds itself through the projector and through the
world. In the cinematic world, all is always already
recorded, all is always already in motion, all is always and
already watching and being watched. Signifiers and
signifieds slide along, meeting at odd angles, according to
surprising trajectories in a dance of collision (the cars,
Betty seeing Diane dead), collusion (the two Camillas, the
hit man giving Diane the key), and elision (the two men in
Winkie's, the black book, the dreadlocked face). There will never have been
subjects. In the opening sequence of swing dancers, we are
already slipping and sliding, twirling back on ourselves,
swapping roles and positions. The dancing couples are not
unique; each is at once iconic and multiplied. The film then
folds over itself, transposing multiple sequences at once, a
trick of light, a flickering, the pure possibility of
cinema. The personal is not erased because it will never
have been. Stripped of memory, we
become cinematic icons: 'Rita' running down the streets of
an LA dawn we've seen before. We are Betty, all doe-eyed and
eager, dreaming of the big screen. We are Coco, the old
Hollywood kook/marm. And yet film remains in motion,
disallowing icons their iconic status: things don't stay
still long enough for a the sign of an icon to seamlessly
discover its signified. Rita becomes Camilla; Betty becomes
Diane; dreams become reality; reality becomes _Mulholland
Dr._. Here, film touches itself:
a lesbian consummation. But this will not be a pure
consummation of the sign, like finding like, signifier
nestling in the bosom of the signified. Here, everything is
always and already cinematic, always and already splayed
along the texture of film. Breasts are artificial, the scene
straight out of pornography -- almost. And yet this is not
ironic winking: it is cinematic appropriation, a pathos that
is at once real and unreal, waking and dream, now and
recorded. The Pleated Plenitude of
the Cinema-Dream Sign There are inevitable blind
spots: the moment separating sleep from waking, the movement
through the blue box, the point of Betty's disappearance and
Diane's appearance. These disjunctures certainly forge
semantic gaps. But this is no de Manian blindness, the
blindness of the enunciating subject, a defining semantic
aporia that propels language. [6] For Lynch, the
world is always and already in motion; de Man's disjunctive
distinction between constative and performative is
superseded. The enunciation has always already been
recorded, *parole* and structure thoroughly enmeshed as the
eye that watches becomes the eye that is watched and the
observer is folded into the texture of the
celluloid. There is no lack, then,
but a kind of plenitude. Signs fold and unfold amidst the
revelation of cinema. Despite the presence of secrets,
nothing is hidden. There may be shadows -- cinematic
shadows, shadows as much of light as of its absence -- but
these are due to the twisting of the filmic fabric, the
complexity of the cinematic twist, the inevitable black hole
separating sleep from waking. For Lynch, cinematic
language is a dream language. But dreams do not refer to
waking life; they are not symbolic or secondary. Like
writing for William Burroughs, Lynch's film is a
transcription of a dream logic. [7] Dreams, like
film, work the world over. But it is a reworking that will
never have been secondary; waking does not precede dreaming.
As _Mulholland Dr._ shows, dreams may very well come first.
In psychoanalytic logic, dreams refer to the waking world
along the same trajectory as the signifier refers to the
signified. But once dreams are no longer secondary, once
waking and dreams have been twisted so thoroughly together
that while they remain distinct their collusion, collision,
and elision is inevitable, the signifier will not seamlessly
find its signified: the two become intimately wound up with
each other, all folds, knots, and pleats. Take Kansas and Oz
and twist them together as you'd twist close a
bag. What emerge are circuits
of slippage, local economies of the sign: signs as swirling
eddies of signification, signifiers and signifieds twirling
around, in and through each other. And yet this is not the
metonymics of the phenomenological gesture, the embodied
communication of Merleau-Ponty. Here, there is metaphor,
disjuncture, the activity of the sign. And while this sign
encounters elisions, its line of sight obscured, it will
never have been blind. This is the cinema-dream sign, at
once fully revealed and thoroughly twisted. University
of California, Berkeley Footnotes 1. Indirect communication
is of course an essential component of both Kierkegaard's
philosophy and his own rhetorical strategy. For his
discussion of Jesus as incognito, see _Practice in
Christianity_ (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1991), pp. 127-142. 2. See Jacques Derrida,
_Margins of Philosophy_ (Chicago, Illinois: University of
Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 1-28. 3. Maurice Merleau-Ponty,
_Phenomenology of Perception_ (London and New York:
Routledge, 1962), p. 184. 4. Gilles Deleuze, 'He
Stuttered', in Constantin V. Boundas and Dorothea Olkowski,
eds, _Gilles Deleuze and the Theater of Philosophy_ (London
and New York: Routledge, 1994). 5. Gilles Deleuze, _Cinema
1: The Movement-Image_ (Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 200. 6. For Paul de Man,
language is defined by the aporia between the now of the
enunciating subject and the has-been of what is enunciated.
The linguistic subject can never quite catch up with
himself; the constative is always trailing the performative.
See Paul de Man, _Allegories of Reading_ (New Haven,
Connetticut: Yale University Press, 1979). 7. See William Burroughs,
_My Education_ (New York: Viking Press, 1995), as well as
the opening pages of _The Western Lands_ (New York: Penguin,
1987). Copyright ©
Film-Philosophy 2003 Daniel Coffeen, 'This is
Cinema: The Pleated Plenitude of the Cinematic Sign in David
Lynch's _Mulholland Dr._', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 7 no. 7,
March 2003
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol7-2003/n7coffeen>. Join the _Film-Philosophy_
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