Postby biotron » Mon May 07, 2007 6:48 am
All very interesting, and veering way off-topic...
IMHO, FWIW - much as we all love to tease apart the finer details and motives of Lynch's work, analyse it and search for answers, there certainly is a great deal of "overthinking" going on in a variety of discussions (not necessarily on here). Naturally, this is initially prompted by seeming paradoxes and difficulties in conventional characterisation / narrative, and made all the more urgent by Lynch's wonderful refusal to open up and engage about certain topics. Nothing makes an obsessive need to "understand" an auteur's work more frenzied than an auteur who throws semi-autistic red-herrings and garbled evasions at his admirers!
LeoF certainly does elaborate upon Nochimson's theories well, and it is interesting to see people articulating core ideas from her work, as opposed to, say, the really weak critical efforts by writers such as John Alexander. At the same time, I also find Nochimson so stubbornly convinced about identifying the "subconscious" / "nonrational" with the feminine, that she makes her own work reductive, simplistic and in danger of turning useful archetypal gender attributions into overarching sources of inspiration for nearly all of the core elements of Lynch's oeuvre. It strikes me that although most of what she says about the overturning of classic gender roles / expectations present in his movies is fascinating, there is a distinct lack of discussion of Eastern spirituality and its relation to "letting go", and that not everything that is "nonrational" or that speaks to the "subconscious" has to be immediately identified with the "feminine", however useful these binary archetypes may be in practice.
With good command of language, it is possible to find correspondences between all sorts of disparate symbols and elements, and unite them together under one feasible theory. Ironically, of course, Nochimson is the one who returns time and time again to the idea of the inadequacy of logocentrism, the ability of words to communicate deeper truths more immediately, the problem of mediation and representation, and so on... and yet she treads that line herself, by relying in the end mostly on what she deems to be "realist", "illusionist", "male", "rational" and "closed" in order to communicate her extremely repetitive notions of how nearly all the significant moments in classic Lynch highlight the opposite, before they point to a new mode of communicative optimism. Hmmmm.
One poster on the Inland Empire board, who may be on here too, regularly writes reams and reams of genuinely interesting analysis on the film, and in fact appears to command the ranks and stamp his mind upon nearly all of the alternatives put forward, most eloquently. However, after a while one gets the impression that people like this are terrified of proliferating symbolism, intertextuality, profusion of meanings, or heterogeneity in general (as Nochimson might point out) and simply have to devote enormous amounts of time and energy into "nailing" something that need not be confined easily or have been so carefully thought-out in the first place.
Sorry that this is so long and off-topic!