sylvia_north wrote:adl345 wrote:Novalis wrote:I like the idea that the booth conversations in the roadhouse and all the names mentioned are dream / hallucination sequences that integrate people she's in hospital with or conversations she's overheard; it makes some sense of all the non sequiturs, animals, and bizarre talk -- not to mention the way James' performance is so at odds with all the other acts, strangely welcomed and over-rated (but why would Audrey dream it this way?). I'm kinda scared that won't be the solution though. I'm afraid it will be more complicated, and that I've slipped up when it comes to catching what Lynch and Frost are up to.
I hate to admit this, but I don't understand this situation at all.
That's where I'm at too. I'm trying to come with some aesthetic or dramatic metric that can be used to separate out the Road House scenes that clearly took place in reality (Shelly and her friends in Part 2, Richard's introduction, James's scenes, the sweeping scene) from all the other much more random scenes and I'm coming up empty. It's notable that the fight scene with James and Green Glove Guy didn't have a band and was instead just playing a song over the speakers (same with the sweeping scene), but the scenes with Shelly & Richard did have bands.
Yeah, it's a threshold place that exists in reality. Enchanted, I guess. Like it was in episode 14. The Bardo moment = liberation, you can be dead or alive. The experience can shatter you into nonexistence or change your life for the better. Talking about Club Silencio and no hay banda, this threshold place shows "the world is a horror show of emptiness- an attitude in keeping with the fear that lies at the heart of some perspectives of quantum mechanics and also at the heart of the cultural nihilism of those who have seen that social systems are relative in form" (nochimson.) The people are all real in that we all participate in the illusion of reality, of stretching and vibrating and overlapping dynamic disappearing and appearing universes.
Also it's a bar we feel safe in, but it conceals the unknown - Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. Remember that Annie mentions Heisenberg at the RR before the weirdness with the coffee cup falling and dripping? This scene is like what happens to Dan at Winkie's, which might only be a hostile deadly place for him. His psychiatrist is fine. So everyone's reality is their own, full of individual illusions, people and events. And Winkie's, like the RR, is a standardized comforting place. Like Lynch's own Bob's Big Boy.. but is anything that solid?
Instead of no recording, at Roadhouse we have famous recording artists- this is the shallow world of the marketplace and illusions of solidity. "The essence of how the marketplace works through top down imposition of illusory form onto organic life, is a negative event. It is constituted of what is not possible and who is not there." It's supposed to break illusions for the audience to have industry rock stars in Twin Peaks, an industry show that makes us question reality. Rebeckah Del Rio, who doubly signifies unreality in this capacity as a figure from Mulholland Dr, appearing supports the Roadhouse = Club Silencio idea.
Hay una banda but rly no hay banda. It's real, but reality is an illusion at the quantum level.
It's strange but if this kind of realisation has been the intent then it looks like Lynch has been playing the long game. Although I'm aware Nochimson divides his work into two, and sees only his latest work as evidencing this kind of radical indeterminacy-plus-effectively-real-unified-consciousness, it seems to me that at least as far back as FWWM Lynch was playing around with thoughts of what matter is for this level. I'm thinking for example of the excised lines from the FWWM script, particularly Mrs. Tremonds:
Code: Select all
FIRST WOODSMAN
(subtitled)
We have descended from pure air.
MAN FROM ANOTHER PLACE
(subtitled)
Going up and down. Intercourse between
the two worlds.
BOB
(subtitled)
Light of new discoveries.
MRS. TREMOND
(subtitled)
Why not be composed of materials and
combinations of atoms?
MRS. TREMOND'S GRANDSON
(subtitled)
This is no accident.
MAN FROM ANOTHER PLACE
(subtitled)
This is a formica table. Green is its
color.
He touches the table.
FIRST WOODSMAN
(subtitled)
Our world.
MAN FROM ANOTHER PLACE
(subtitled)
With chrome. Any everything will
proceed cyclically.
SECOND WOODSMAN
(subtitled)
Boneless.
MIKE
(subtitled)
Yes, find the middle place.
Bob begins to scream with anger.
BOB
(subtitled)
I HAVE THE FURY OF MY OWN MOMENTUM.
TREMOND'S GRANDSON
(subtitled)
Fell a victim.
'Why not be composed of materials and combinations of atoms?' seems to be like a pre-ontological question, as if it were entirely a matter of consciousness what form being might take for these folks. So it's as if they pre-exist in this pre-ontological domain (outside language, law and symbol and all the rest of the 'illusory' marketplace stuff) but are in a position of power with respect to how they might come to exist within it. While to me this is so much like Early (German) Romanticism's obsession with the infinite power of the author/dreamer to create, but having created always retaining a link to that potential and being able to rub out and redo things so that nothing is ever final or complete or reified (which is where Wilson's ideas of Lynch's Transcendental Irony are all ultimately sourced), from a quantum perspective I guess it represents the co-existence of every possibility: everything happens, on its own illusory level. Which particular thread we follow it will always be partial; the creative impulse is the thing, not the particular story. In both accounts there is the same degree of detachment from the particular. It doesn't really matter what happens or appears to happen, the important thing is
that something is happening, and this seems to be where our attention is being directed by Lynch. Something is happening, and it happens not necessarily because of the will of some creator figure, but because it is woven out of the pure possibility that is inherent in the nothingness of existence. I can kinda grasp this metaphysics of potentiality because I read a lot of ontology texts, not least Aristotle's
Metaphysics in the past. What jars with me is the Vedic reading, because I don't understand it and can't follow its contradictions. It's like having to suspend the difference between the real and the unreal and deal with this third place which is both. I'm used to this contradiction on a different level, for example, when dealing with things like questions of national borders, financialised economies or biological ideas of race, where things which the physical science has no hard determining boundaries or determinations for nonetheless exist absolutely in the way that human communities tend to perform and enforce them, making them
wirklichkeit (effectively real). They take on reality because of 'social objectivity', that is, because they are mass-performed, despite being ungrounded in any phenomena of natural science. The whole of structural anthropology, from the study of human institutions to Hegelian ideas of externalisation and the ethical, relies on that one insight: historically, humans weave stories out of thin air and then perform them as if they were ahistorical givens. We organise our experience in line with certain parameters that vary from epoch to epoch and culture to culture: there's no tablet of stone telling us what the baseline experience should be, so together we work it out -- and thus societies exist. All this is well-rehearsed and understood by lots of people. What I can't fathom is some kind of crucial difference in this Nochimson-Lynch conversation, that she keeps referring to, which is that Lynch isn't talking about the human world, or isn't limiting this insight to the human world. Is this difference predicated on the sentience of what we call matter? Is it that, as Mrs. Tremond says, thoughtforms pre-exist their substantial realisation and 'the universe' itself is just one version of what is always unravelling from these primordial thoughts/dreams? If so, I'm out: I don't want to understand Lynch any more. I've been down this road before and it doesn't lead anywhere but mysticism, political quietism and idealism of the kind I need to avoid.
If, on the other hand, there is the possibility of retaining some kind of philosophy of action in all this then I can accept this vision as a valid/workable worldview (without having to accept it myself of course).
Sorry to blather on like this in a topic about Audrey. Maybe we should get a separate thread for these kind of discussions. I'd happily keep it going through the bleak days ahead, when TPTR is all done.
