Ecrits by Jacques Lacan, Wild at Heart & Blue Velvet by David Lynch
In my last post I wrote about Jacques Lacan's account of "the self's radical eccentricity with respect to itself". If even a fraction of what he says is true then we're all screwed. I was reading Lacan because, following Slavoj Žižek's path in The Pervert's Guide to Cinema, I was trying to use Lacan to understand the films of David Lynch*.
For Lacan, the arrival and endurance of fear, desire and language mark the beginning and the end of each and every possibility of having a credibly stable identity. This is because, from the "Mirror Stage" onward the psyche is torn by conflict between unconscious desires and fears and conscious control.
However, it's not at all accurate to think of these drives as blind instincts. Such impulses belong to pre-linguistic children or animals. For Lacan the 'unconscious is structured like a language'. The unconscious comes into being at the moment of the repression of certain desires and ideals. The unconscious is these repressed desires and ideals and, moreover, these desires and ideals are only possible as language.
For Lacan, these ideals and desires control the rational, conscious mind. As I mentioned in my last post one of the most demanding and defining of these ideals is the fantasy of the stable, perfect ego projected by the unconscious order of the 'Imaginary'. The paradox that Lacan reminds us of consists in the fact that these projections of an ideal ego are from the beginning, not the self's own creations at all: rather they are composed of and fueled by fears and desires, words and images that could never be anything but 'other'. For Lacan, the 'unconscious is the discourse of the other'.
Of course, as I pointed out in my last post, normality, or rather, normativity, is the unconscious, conscious and public work of policing that hides this truth.
Movies are part of this police force. The Australian writer Barbara Creed places this effect of cinema firmly within the context of Lacanian psychoanalytic thinking:
"....the viewing experience, in which the spectator identifies with the glamorous star is not unlike a re-enactment of the moment when the child acquires its first sense of selfhood or subjectivity through an identification with an ideal self. But, as Lacan pointed out, this is also a moment of mis-recognition - the child is not really a fully formed subject. He will only see himself in this idealized way when his image is reflected back through the eyes of others. Thus identity is always dependent on mediation."
Most movies work to seduce and deceive the audience into an unconscious moment of recognition. They answer the perpetual unconscious desire of the Imaginary order for objects to maintain the promise of a stable identity.
David Lynch's movies do not do this. They are about the tensions arising from the paradox I mentioned above that fear, desire and language simultaneously divide and seek to reconcile the unconscious and conscious mind.
His heroes and heroines are demented, disgusting, tormented and terrifying. None of them presents a credible stand-in for the Imaginary order's desire for a stable ego.
Willem Dafoe's performance as Bobby Peru in Wild at Heart is typical. Lynch presents a scene that could have no place in a standard romantic film. His filthy teeth are shown in close up as he whispers 'say fuck me' to Lula as, all the while, he's groping her body. To add to the incongruity Lula responds with desire to this assault.
The point is not so much that this scene is disgusting - for all I know it is exactly what some people have in mind as an ideal scenario - it is that it challenges the audience's expectations that desire flows along conventional channels. It creates an analytic distance between the audience and the projected ideal egos because what is served up in this scene is basically consensual rape with a side order of bad dentistry.
In a pattern that Lynch had already established in Blue Velvet, Nicholas Cage plays the other side of desire. He is a rogueish character whose essential goodness remains despite his criminality. Where Defoe's character is basically a hyper-exaggerated abomination of a sick unconscious, Cage's is a similarly hyper-exaggerated cinematic staple: the eminently reformable (through the love of a good woman) bad boy.
The film begins with Sailor beating another man to death with hilarious cartoon violence that draws from Tom and Jerry and the fight scenes from an Elvis Presley vehicle. Cage smashes his victim’s brains all over the floor, hurls the obviously dead body against the wall and lights a cigarette.
The film concludes with an impossible reconciliation between the two lovers. It is as hilarious as the opening scene. Sailor comes running back to get Lula. The climb onto the roof of a car, embrace and Cage starts to sing:
"Love me tender" "Sailor!" she replies in ecstacy, this was the song he'd said he'd only sing to his truly beloved.
Blue Velvet presents different versions of desire. Each version is animated by cinematic 'heroes' that challenge conventional audience expectations about what is normal and abnormal desire. In Lacanian terms, Lynch denies the Imaginary's desire for a stable, perfect ego-image. He does this by presenting different ways in which desire can go wrong.
In Lacan's account of the unconscious, desire operates by means of contiguous association. In the chapter of Ecrits devoted to this topic - "The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud" he writes: "Desire is a metonymy". What he means is that associations that trigger desire are not made by means of similarity - anything can become an object of desire. This concept is often paired with his constrasting claim that "The symptom is a metaphor"; in other words, mental distress or illness limps from one object of desire to another on the basis on similarity; not contiguity. Lacan: "...the subject cries out through his symptom..."
What has this got to do with Blue Velvet?
The desire between Jeffrey and Sandy is utterly conventional. Their relationship is more like a symptom than true desire. This is simply because their relationship is an off-the-shelf version of high school romance that is just like everyone else's. Lynch's presentation of their conventionality is ironic and exaggerated; their romance is played out in scenes suffocated by the cloying and saturating theme music of "Mysteries of Love" by Julee Cruise. Lynch's satirises their love as an illness (symptom) shared by everyone else (metaphor) in Middle America.
The relationship between Frank (Dennis Hopper) and Dorothy (Isabella Rosselini) could never be described as conventional! In Lacanian terms, Frank's association of blue velvet and his oxygen mask seems to exemplify the operation of desire. Neither one seems in any sense 'similar' to commonly understood objects of desire. Yet these are objects that have been fixated upon: the metonymy has been arrested as a fetish. Lacan describes fetish as a "'perverse' fixation at the very point of suspension of the signifying chain at which the screen-memory is immobilized and the fascinating image of the fetish becomes frozen."
If fetishism was all that Frank had to worry about things wouldn't be so bad for him. There is so much going on here that is deeply unsettling. His version of desire involves sucking oxygen through a mask, stuffing a piece of Blue Velvet into his mouth and trying - quite literally - to enter Dorothy's vagina head first: "Mommy, mommy, mommy, baby wants to fuuuuck...uuughhhhh".
What is happening here? It seems that this is a bizarre but obvious enactment of unresolved Oedipal desire: Frank literally wants to fuse with the mother's body: he wants to erase the distance between the object of desire and himself.
This can be understood as such an unconscious frenzy but that is too easy.
Frank is fully aware of what he's doing. This is conscious, not unconscious action. His desire is a violent, oddly rational, attempt to invert desire. While Lacan points out that desire is truly the free play of metonymic association where the unconscious is allowed to move from one meaning to another, this is a crazy attempt to control the uncontrollable. Frank wants to effect some kind of crazy tautology where he reverts to an imagined state of infantile union with the female body.
This can't happen of course and this is the source of his rage: "Don't you fucking look at me" he roars as he punches Dorothy in the face.
Somehow I don't think that if a Lacanian pointed out to Frank the error of his ways; namely that "The subject is spoken rather than speaking" things would end well.
The relationship between Jeffrey and Dorothy shows the 'bleeding' effect of violence into sexuality. Dorothy was already represented as enjoying the violent attentions of Frank in the 'Baby wants to Fuuuck!" scene. If that was a disturbing encounter the sex between her and Jeffrey is only slightly less so: "Hit me!" she begs him, while he, a simple boy next door, at first refuses and then does as he is asked to do. In Lacanian terms this association (violence with sex) is a symptom because it is exactly what she has already experienced. And yet there is some degree of taming taking place. Is Lynch presenting a 'safe' version of S&M after the insane carry on of the scene between Frank and Dorothy?
Hardly. She ends up naked and demented on the streets and in any case her relationship with Jeffrey never gets off the ground due to the overweening imperative that Jeffrey and Sandy fulfill their 'destiny' as conventional sweethearts.
There are no heroes in these movies. The Lacanian Imaginary may demand them but it's not going to find them here. This is good news: remember Brecht's ventriloquism of Gallileo: "Unhappy is the land that needs a hero"
* 1: My Reading of Lacan was limited to two sections of the Ecrits: "The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud" and "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the / Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience" and illuminated by secondary texts, in particular the chapter on Lacan on Kearney's Modern Movements in European Philosophy.
2: I had intended to include Mullholland Drive in this post but a friend very generously wrote about it for me and this showed me that I didn't need Lacan to understand what was going on. Timing is everything.
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