Interview with Martha Nochimson about David Lynch

[LostInTheMovies]

I had a great conversation with Martha Nochimson a week or two ago and just posted it on my blog this morning. We discussed some of the ideas presented in her books The Passion of David Lynch and David Lynch Swerves. We briefly discussed Eraserhead, Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire, The Elephant Man, and Fire Walk With Me but the bulk of the conversation ended up being about Twin Peaks the series, more so than I expected. Topics included episode 16 (which she liked more than I expected), how Lynch might have carried on the story if the show had continued and he had been more involved, and why Twin Peaks isn't just another "dead girl" show.

http://thedancingimage.blogspot.com/201 ... artha.html

[Fernanda]

http://www.filefactory.com/file/41e1zig ... 2-1993.pdf

Film Quarterly 46. 1992/1993. No. 2. [Winter] pp. 22-34

[skawitch]

I wasn't quite sure which of your (wonderful) threads to post this on, but I've opted for this one. Firstly I just want to say how much I've loved all your posts and the work you are doing on Lynch here and on your website. I'm really, really loving it and hope that you stick around on dugpa after your run of articles ends/reduces.
I loved this interview and what Nochimson has to say about Lynch. I started reading Swerves a few months ago and it was a revelation which fundamentally shifted my opinion on Lynch from almost the first page. I've can't wait to finish it after xmas when life returns to normal.
With all that said, I have a massive, massive bugbear with this (I'll apologise in advance for the length of what follows and if it gets a little rant-y):
"That’s very, very interesting because I think that I was uncomfortable with letting Leland off completely. Here was a place – and this is not at all usual for me when I look at Lynch like, wait a second – so are we excusing all child abuse by saying something came in from outside? That was very uncomfortable for me. You know, I never asked Lynch that question: was he uncomfortable with that too."
I love, love, love Twin Peaks - there's a few things I dislike in it (Earle, the civil war plot, etc.), however the bad stuff only makes the good even better. That says there is one thing I loathe about the series: the free pass it gives to Leland to the point of trivialising an incredibly serious subject. It's not uncomfortable, it's downright negligent. It ruins the end of this plot, disgusts me and I hate it with a passion. Part of what I love about FWWM is how it restores some of his culpability. It frustrates me that a scholar can overlook such a massive a question about one of the centeral pillars of the series.
Full disclosure: part of my job is working with sex offenders. Two of my best friends were sexually abused by family members. I've seen the psychic damage these actions cause and it is difficult to fully comprehend. I've seen how people handle dealing with the abuse that they've perpetrated. I'm fully aware of the often cyclical nature of abuse and the generations of hurt and pain it causes.
I am quite willing to accept the supernatural elements in someways acting Leland's 'excuse' for his actions, but there's only so far that goes.
Sorry to focus on the one part of the interview I disagree with - I just want to emphasise how much I love your work and, apart from that one part, Nochimson's work (or as much as I have read of it so far).
Edited: corrected critic to read scholar

[LostInTheMovies]

GREAT comment and there's so much to talk about here. First of all, thanks for the compliments - I'm really glad my pieces are clicking with people. And I agree that Swerves feels like a big game-changer, and Passion is great as well. Even when I disagree with her I feel like she's getting something fundamentally about Lynch that other people (including myself, sometimes) are missing.

I love, love, love Twin Peaks - there's a few things I dislike in it (Earle, the civil war plot, etc.), however the bad stuff only makes the good even better. That says there is one thing I loathe about the series: the free pass it gives to Leland to the point of trivialising an incredibly serious subject. It's not uncomfortable, it's downright negligent. It ruins the end of this plot, disgusts me and I hate it with a passion. Part of what I love about FWWM is how it restores some of his culpability. It frustrates me that a scholar can overlook such a massive a question about one of the centeral pillars of the series.

I hear you completely on this. As for Martha Nochimson, to be fair I got the sense from our conversation that she might actually agree with you - and be wondering why she didn't ask this as well (and maybe in the next conversation, she will!). It's interesting because she's also called other authors out on ignoring the subject of abuse - there's a great footnote in Passion where she points out that virtually no long-form work on Lynch (at that time anyway) actually addressed Fire Walk With Me in light of incest. And yet as you (and she herself) point(s) out, she had a blind spot herself on it, not bringing the ambiguity of it up to Lynch himself.

I would really like to hear Lynch's answer on that question, and I wonder if he'd open up a bit if asked. I say that because he's spoken more on that subject than just about anything else in his work. He won't say if Dorothy Valens is a masochist, he certainly won't reveal the nature of Betty/Diane's psychic split but on at least two occasions (in the interviews with Chris Rodley in Lynch on Lynch and in the cast-interview part of Between Two Worlds) he point-blank says that Fire Walk With Me is a film about incest. Which seems like a no-brainer but on several occasions I've run into fans of the film who deny it's anything of the sort.

You may find my own first response to the film interesting: http://thedancingimage.blogspot.com/200 ... me_09.html. This remains (and will remain until the 2016 series starts up) the only time I relayed an immediate impression of any piece of Twin Peaks. It was an experience I've never really had watching any film: at the same time I realized on a gut level that this was a cinematic tour-de-force (I've never understood how so many viewers weren't transported emotionally by the movie, but that's another subject!) and really upset with it. Somehow all the things I had managed to overlook on the series the film made unavoidable, and I was ok with that, but suddenly the few remaining traces of the show's entertainment value didn't gibe with me. It was as if the film's very honesty made me resent the few clinging threads of dishonesty, even as far more dishonest patches of the series hadn't bothered me.

Needless to say, I've revised my opinion and don't even see the "flawed masterpiece" as being quite so flawed. There were a few reasons for this: 1) I couldn't shake the impression of its visual and emotional power and even seeing it as a mess, the experience it offered me was so rare it had to be valued; 2) I read the reviews the next day and realized that, flaws or not, this was a film that had to be passionately defended - the critics had been so gobsmackingly wide of the mark in their takedowns that my own objections had to take a backseat; 3) especially over time, as the initial impression subsided, I could appreciate the other things the film was doing and also how they related back into the Laura Palmer story. In particular, I've always been a big fan of incorporating mythological elements into a pyschological portraits (one of the things I love about Martha's work is how she brings Jung to bear on Lynch's vision). Oddly, this element I objected to in FWWM was something I usually loved in other works so I began to appreciate how these qualities added to rather than detracted from the intensity, and the larger implications, of her tale. That said for years I couldn't see Twin Peaks and Fire Walk With Me as really belonging to the same phenomenon and the disconnect kind of bugged me (more to the series' detriment than the film's) until seeing the Missing Pieces this summer finally made them feel like part of the same universe to me.

Sorry, long, winding response but you've opened up such a fascinating can of worms. I do think the fundamental reason I can't quite let go of Twin Peaks is that it makes me, in some ways, uncomfortable. It is at once a work of bewitching, fun, almost joyous entertainment and a work of art dealing with such immense pain that it transports me to another level but also leaves me feeling drained. It's really Lynch in a nutshell: the beauty and horror of life in the same package so that we can't neatly divorce one from the other. This is kind of a tangent to your main point, but there it is.

Btw, have you read Warren Goldstein's essay from 1990, "Incest for the Millions"? It's written after episode 14 and he really expresses a visceral shock and dismay that I think many viewers must have felt, but few vocalized (the typical press response after Nov. 10 was "ho hum, the big mystery's over and oh yeah, it happened to be her dad"). Though I disagree with his conclusions I really appreciate how he delved into this aspect of the reveal that was generally overlooked at the time. And still is today - read the recent press coverage about Twin Peaks returning, and you'd think it's all cherry pie and dancing midgets.

As for Leland/Bob...

Full disclosure: part of my job is working with sex offenders. Two of my best friends were sexually abused by family members. I've seen the psychic damage these actions cause and it is difficult to fully comprehend. I've seen how people handle dealing with the abuse that they've perpetrated. I'm fully aware of the often cyclical nature of abuse and the generations of hurt and pain it causes.
I am quite willing to accept the supernatural elements in someways acting Leland's 'excuse' for his actions, but there's only so far that goes.

Yes, I think for me part of the power and relevance of Twin Peaks (and the inability to overlook the troublesome - and courageous as well - aspects of its take on incest) is knowing abuse victims in real life, and also knowing the abuser, knowing that he was charismatic, personable, a fun person to be around and yet also contained this monster inside of him. At its best, Twin Peaks captures this beautifully and so poetically. There's a great discussion about the film by two fans who happen to be both fiction authors and practicing therapists: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvlaoTDEJ2Y and they really nail it.

On the other hand, at times the show itself seems so uncomfortable with what it's unwrapped. I'm not sure if you've had a chance yet, but my most recent chapter in the video series delves into this pretty explicitly, especially vis a vis episode 16. Lynch and Frost CHOSE to make incest a subject - it wasn't forced upon them, it wasn't like they had no other route to go (although there certainly was no other route with as much resonance or narrative/thematic logic behind it - from day one, the secretive, self-harming, and dualistic nature of Laura's life suggests she was abused). Anyone could have had Bob inside him, but they decided to make it Leland. To then double back and suggest, quite strongly, that it "wasn't really him" is extremely problematic to say the least. Why go there if you're not going to go there? And I think they struggled with that quite a bit (yes, I think Lynch did too though he recused himself from #16).

As frustrating as it can all be, I'm kind of thankful the messiness is right there onscreen because it says so much about the conflicted feelings not just of the creators, but the viewers. No work of art that I know of has ever contained its own critique so thoroughly. You read some of those takedowns, by feminists or other critics, and you think to yourself, "Well, yes...but Twin Peaks ITSELF already makes this point!" And I think while the show and film fell into many pitfalls, one it avoided is treating incest and abuse in a clinical, didactic, or detached manner. Fire Walk With Me plays so raw and real in part because it grows out of a series that hooked us in with mystery, eroticism, and humor: it's like we've been lured into a trap (which is very much the theme of Goldstein's essay though he doesn't appreciate the positive aspects of this). And rather than tell us in a self-serious tone: "this is a film about incest, a VERY SERIOUS SUBJECT" which is more digestible, its starting point is humanist and fantastical so that we experience it all viscerally instead of cerebrally.

Needless to say, I'm quite curious how Lynch and Frost will tackle this aspect of the story in 2016. I suspect it's not going to go away (nor should it).

[harmolodic]

More on TP and FWWM's interrogation of incest: http://www.tobecontd.com/twin-peaks/full/

(Excellent writing btw.)

[LostInTheMovies]

More on TP and FWWM's interrogation of incest: http://www.tobecontd.com/twin-peaks/full/

(Excellent writing btw.)

Thanks. That was what really got the ball rolling for me in writing about Twin Peaks this year and like everything else it was random coincidence. Tony (whom I hadn't spoken to in a while) contacted me out of the blue to say he'd been invited to do a conversation on that site and asked if I'd like to discuss FWWM. Not knowing that I'd just gotten back into the series a month earlier. Incidentally the second piece I wrote for that conversation, "Back Door to the Black Lodge," references Martha Nochimson. I hadn't even read Swerves yet but even the description had me intrigued!

[Fernanda]

There is violence involved in liberating ourselves from social pressures. There’s violence.

I think what interests me about it is, even though there are multiple ways you can read it, he is inflicting violence on somebody else who seems to be feeling pain and seems to be helpless. Among all of the other connotations it holds, the allegorical aspects, there is an element of it which is a mirror image of some of the other films. Fire Walk With Me is certainly an inversion. You have a father killing a child, and it’s seen from the opposite perspective. So I totally agree with you that there is something else at work in Eraserhead. It would be a mistake to simply reduce it to some literal level in which Daddy’s killing the baby because he doesn’t want to feed it anymore. Obviously that’s way reductive but I still see, among all the other stuff, that element there and it intrigues me that he went there because he didn’t have to. He could have made it work on that level, on the allegorical level without also at the same time giving you this conflicting feeling of horror and…

INT. LAURA'S BEDROOM - NIGHT

The room is dark. Laura is pressed up against the headboard of her
bed staring at the window. The fan ominously whirls in the hall.

Bob appears in her window and enters the room.

Bob moves down on top of her. His hand moves between her legs.
Laura fights with all her might to keep staring at his face. To know it.
To unlock it. Her hands go up. She holds his face... squeezes it
as he moves on top of her.

Slowly, what she always knew deep inside of her becomes clear.

BOB BECOMES LELAND.

She screams and passes out into hell.

Episode 16
"So now the sadness comes - the revelation. There is a depression after an answer is given. It was almost fun not knowing. Yes, now we know. At least we know what we sought in the beginning.

"But there is still the question: why? And this question will go on and on until the final answer comes. Then the knowing is so full, there is no room for questions."

Episode 17
"Complications set in - yes, complications. How many times have we heard: 'it's simple'. Nothing is simple. We live in a world where nothing is simple. Each day, just when we think we have a handle on things, suddenly some new element is introduced and everything is complicated once again.

"What is the secret? What is the secret to simplicity, to the pure and simple life? Are our appetites, our desires undermining us? Is the cart in front of the horse?"

(Nochimson)
"In the scene in the Red Room, Mike and Bob perform a ritual of transubstantiation that redeems all of the chaos of the rational space of ordinary reality. The return to wholeness of the masculine creative potential occurs when Bob heals Leland's wound. This healing is represented as the return of "garmonbozia", pain and sorrow, to Mike and the Little Man. This bodes well since feeling returns to the masculine creative potential from which it has been disconnected in Bob's unfeeling, unrepentant acts of brutality. Surely some parallel exists here with Laura's numb arm in her dream and the use of Annie as a replacement for that arm.

Once this healing is done, a ritual of the corn, the ingestion of the seed, is performed - the Little Man eats the creamed corn. An eerie texture to this act is created by the use of slow-motion reverse projection of the actor spitting the corn onto the spoon. If we read the ingestion of the corn as an inversion of the first major narrative of Eraserhead, that of Henry Spencer expelling the matter of potential creativity from his mouth, then we can say that the Little Man is here preventing the social labelling of the seed. It is another element in the film's final reassurances that energy contains its own limits, even in a reality that contains the volcanic destructiveness of Bob."

http://www.tobecontd.com/twin-peaks/full/

If Twin Peaks is filled with secrets, Fire Walk With Me empties itself of them.

I think it is an attestment of Lynch's gristleness that he was able to take one of his main concerns ("to brush up against the secret names of truth") and upon realizing that the unlocking/literalization of the Laura Palmer mystery which he sought to postpone could somehow empty it out of a more mythic resonance, he made a film that in many ways dispersed that literalization to a breaking point and in the process preserved its inherent unboundedness by putting the corn back in the (unlabeled) can where it belongs, or at least in the spoon. Surely some parallel exists with Leland's blood spilled on the floor and Cooper lying down in his bathroom, the music that starts with the nurse putting on the ring and the mirror connecting Annie to Cooper, with Bob nowhere to be seen. There are still questions about the truth of it all.

http://www.lynchnet.com/fwwm/fwwmpress.html

"Chronicling the events of the seven days leading up to the murder of Laura Palmer, Twin Peaks -- Fire Walk With Me opens on a grisly scene that foreshadows by a year and one week the tragedy soon to befall the seemingly idyllic town: we spy the body of Teresa Banks as it bobs along the Wind River in Washington. This turn of events leads FBI Bureau Chief Gordon Cole (DAVID LYNCH) to summon Agent Chester Desmond (CHRIS ISAAK) to his Oregon office to confer on the baffling case.

From the time Desmond gets off the plane -- where he's met by Cole and Cole's peculiar cousin Lil -- clues to the mysterious case begin to present themselves, often in startling forms and at the most unexpected moments.

Desmond deduces that the malignant current that extinguished Teresa Banks' life has wended its way through the entire community where she lived, including the local police force. Investigating the shabby trailer park Teresa called home, he stumbles across a clue so charged with meaning that its discovery leads to implications beyond the merely magic.

Next on the scene is Agent Dale Cooper (KYLE MACLACHLAN), whose keen intuitive powers are key to cracking a case fraught with perplexing riddles.

While these first-rate investigative minds strive to stem the tide of evil that will claim yet another victim, we follow the activities of Laura Palmer (SHERYL LEE). The physical and emotional extremes Laura has experienced make it impossible for her to lead a normal life.

Moreover, as we become aware of the private doings of Laura's friends and relatives in Twin Peaks, it is evident that the citizens in this town are on a bad trip -- and Laura is the blondest, baddest trip of all.

A visitation from FBI Agent Phillip Jeffries (DAVID BOWIE), presumed dead when he vanished several years earlier, sheds further light on the conspiracy threatening Laura's life. Warnings of pending disaster become increasingly urgent when a neighbor's gift to Laura reveals the true source of her torment.

As her nightmares invade her real life, Laura's drug use and promiscuity accelerate her life's downward spiral. At The Power and the Glory, the infamously wild nightclub on the U.S.-Canadian border, Laura betrays her best friend Donna Hayward (MOIRA KELLY). Determined that she will no longer be the conduit for the evil that has invaded her heart, Laura takes the only escape available to her.

As the story closes, it becomes clear that the voracious dark force has not yet finished with the town of Twin Peaks -- and that Laura's struggle will continue from another place."

(Olson)
"In the time before Eraserhead, and before Lynch’s spiritual crisis and his split from his wife, an exhibit of ancient East Indian carved sandstone sculptures drew him, Peggy, and little Jennifer to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Near closing time in the museum hallways, Lynch wandered off and got separated from his family. “There was nobody around, just these carvings and it was really quiet. I rounded a corner and my eyes went down the corridor and there was a pedestal at the very end. My eyes went up the pedestal and at the top was this head of Buddha. When I looked at the head, white light shot out of it into my eyes and it was like—boom!—I was full of bliss.”

"The Lady in the Radiator brought solace to Henry at the time when Transcendental Meditation brightened Lynch’s life. Even though Lynch had been unfaithful to Peggy, and they split up, he still, touchingly, saw her as his significant other and wanted her to share his galvanizing TM experience: “Peg, I need you to be excited about this too.” Lynch was irritated when Peggy said she wasn’t interested in pursing TM, and an echo of this emotional dynamic shows up in Blue Velvet fifteen years later when Sandy balks at sharing Jeffrey’s Mystery-obsession, and Jeffrey says, “Sandy, don’t take that attitude.” Peggy recalls that “David was like a TM fundamentalist, and he embraced all this philosophical structure that was alarmingly detailed, like the Mormon religion. Where you go after death, what happens in heaven, the idea that suicide receives a horrifying punishment in the next world.” At the time, Peggy wrote in her journal that what David wanted more than anything else in life was “inner peace,” and in order to help achieve it, he went to work on his outer, physical being. What Peggy calls “the era of the Pure David” was born. “He became a vegetarian, he quit drinking, though previously he never used to have more than a little wine, and he quit smoking.” With a laugh, she adds that “there was plenty of sex, I’m sure, but everything else was out the window.”

[Fernanda]

http://www.tobecontd.com/twin-peaks/full/

The ambiguity in the way Lynch approaches each film’s respective heroine is disturbing because of the reprehensible sex acts on display.

Laura, on the other hand, is a fully fleshed-out human being.

http://www.davidlynch.de/lauradernpremiere.html

The movie has its share of shockers. In a reprise of the Frank/Dorothy duet, Bobby Peru gets Lula alone in a hotel room. "Of course, the little sex bunny is going to get fucked over for being a little sexpot," says Dern. "It´s a very weird scene, but in a way, I´m completely in control. In a way, she is thinking, oh my God, this scene is so sick, and here I am a victim all over again. Oh my God, oh my god. And I thought, wait a minute, not only do I get sexually satisfied, but I never give myself away. There´s the decision to let it turn her on, but not too far." Says Dafoe, "Laura´s the kind of actress you like to play across from. When you look in her eyes, you always feel like flying by the seat of your pants. It spurs you on to push things a little bit."

[LostInTheMovies]

I think it is an attestment of Lynch's gristleness that he was able to take one of his main concerns ("to brush up against the secret names of truth") and upon realizing that the unlocking/literalization of the Laura Palmer mystery which he sought to postpone could somehow empty it out of a more mythic resonance, he made a film that in many ways dispersed that literalization to a breaking point and in the process preserved its inherent unboundedness by putting the corn back in the (unlabeled) can where it belongs, or at least in the spoon.

Not sure what you mean by "dispersing the literalization to a breaking point" - how is the literalization "dispersed"? BECAUSE it is taken so far? Personally, I've never been able to square Lynch's desire to keep Laura's secrets with his desire to share them in brutal detail. And the second desire seems to me far richer, more powerful, and necessary than withholding information in perpituity - not in the case of every Lynch work, but in this one certainly.

[Fernanda]

http://books.google.com.br/books?id=l5J ... &q&f=false

Clearly a large part of what made Twin Peaks tick in dramatic and specifically audio-visual terms was precisely the tentalising and apparently unbridgeable distance created by Lynch between Laura and the viewing and listening subject - a distance created and sustained by the fragmentary visions and sounds of the female protagonist provided, which, in the words of Michel Chion, 'served everyone as a prop of their own projections and fantasies.'

According to Hutcheon, parody is a form of bitextuality wherein the 'source' and 'new' texts are allowed to coexist, always asserting their difference, and yet rarely, as might be the case in earlier forms of parody, 'coming to blows' - with the latter in some way 'substracting' from the former.

"[It] had a lot of baggage with it. It's as free and experimental as it could within the dictates it had to follow."