In psychology, the shadow is the part of the unconscious that swallows threatening information and experiences that a conscious mind cannot hold onto and, at the same time, remain functional. However, a periodic confrontation with the shadow is necessary for a healthy psyche. In a Lynch film it is often the job of some sort of rule-maker, interrogator, or detective to engineer just such a confrontation. These detective types set boundaries on a film’s fantasy narrative and try to steer the main character back to the truth. — Adam C. Walker
The “Shadow Self and Detective” (in other words, the doppelganger and alter-ego) is one of 12 “tools” that Adam C. Walker offers in his insightful essay, “Reading Inland Empire: A Mental Toolbox for Interpreting a Lynch Film” (Metaphilm, Nov 2007). What I really like about this article is that it clearly provides a number of frameworks for comprehending David Lynch’s seemingly impenetrable narratives (not just Inland Empire itself), by looking specifically at recurring narrative structures.
My favorite doppelganger from Lynch’s work is Robert Blake as the “Mystery Man” from Lost Highway. In an interview with Cinefantastique, Lynch describes him as a “character [who] came out of a feeling of a man who, whether real or not, gave the impression that he was supernatural.”
“Whether real or not” is a hallmark of not only uncanny uncertainty, but Lynch’s proclivity for subjective realism on a plane that alienates most pop audiences. But what I like about David Lynch is this persistent use of surrealism, framed in a way that inevitably makes you wonder “Where is this going?” That is the enigma of all plot forms, but Lynch constantly keeps us guessing because the way he puts together scenes is always skewed while remaining just “familiar” enough to hook our interest. Something is going on, but we’re never told quite what it is. The “Mystery Man” embodies this, employing his camera through tout the film in dastardly ways.
Beyond character, Walker suggests that the template for understanding Lynch’s narrative strategy is Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” since Lynch seems to loop plots together as if they were echo-effects of some primary event that are pinging off the walls of a central character’s mind. There is no story so much as there is a vague sense of deja vu, as characters try to understand their own dilemmas — which are our dilemmas in the very act of experiencing the film. Paramnesia at play: the subjective experience of a Lynch film is the cinematic equivalent of waking up from not a dream, but a concussion.
Steve Shaviro describes it perfectly, in his treatment of Lynch’s Lost Highway (here lifted from his work in progress, Stranded in the Jungle, but for his brilliant full article on LH see Paradoxa 1998):
…the first half of Lost Highway is so brooding and mysterious. It pushes up against the limits of what can be seen and said. So much is hinted at, and so little is shown. Even the event upon which the whole film turns, Fred’s apparent murder of Renee, does not take place on screen. We see what comes before, and what comes after. But we do not–cannot–see the act itself. It is missing from the body of the film, just as it is missing from Fred’s own consciousness. The murder drives the story, but it stands apart from the story. It is like an intrusion from another world.
Lost Highway explores this “intrusion” of the uncanny in many ways that are founded in earlier forms of cinema, rendering this film a double of other films in a highly subjective allusion to film genre history. Much has been written about this. Zizek has written a lengthy article on how the film is an “apotheosis of horror and noir genres” in his article “The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime”. Fiona Villella discusses how its “Circular Narrative” echoes the narratology of the French New Wave. Maarten de Pourcq looks at the uncanny way that sound and image work together in the film, referencing others. Alana Thain (.pdf) sees the film as “haunted by Hitchcock’s Vertigo.” And Valterri Kokko sees the uncanny at the center of “Psychological Horror in the Films of David Lynch.”
Film is a highway on which you get lost; if his movies don’t make sense to you, they are succeeding…you’re lost.
