1 Tess Murdoch Rufi Cole Critical Reasoning 13, December 2011

An Exploration into Experience-Driven Narrative David Lynch is an expert storyteller who unconventionally alters traditional narrative by making Lost Highway not a plot-driven film, but experience-driven. Lynch, who has been directing and writing films since the late 1970s, has fostered quite a dialogue with the American public. A dialogue based on unconventional non-linear narratives and his signature haunting visuals. He is now a master of transcendental meditation, which contrasts strikingly against the stark tragi-comedic themes of his films. Nonetheless, one does not need to have a thorough understanding of Lynchs upbringing or his personal beliefs to formulate an understanding of his work. I believe Lynch only wants his films to resonate, to evoke an emotional response from the viewer. This is, in essence, Lynchs intention. So how does Lynch evoke this emotional response? In this essay I am going to discuss how David Lynch deconstructs traditional narrative. I am going to talk about the inescapable narrative voice and authoritative tone within Lost Highway. I am exploring how Lynch asks for viewer participation experientially, forging an intimate relationship between the experience of the film and the viewer. I am examining how Lynch contorts the viewers innate mental states through this relationship. And lastly, I am seeking to show how Lost Highway does not end with the closing credits, but rather, another story begins, the viewers own. Dick Laurent is dead (Lost Highway). This line ambiguously defines the structure of the film in that it is said at the beginning and returns at the end. The main character of Fred Madison answers the phone to hear those words spoken words. We are then introduced to Freds distant

2 wife, Renee. We, as the viewer, do not yet know who the voice is on the other end of the line. As the movie unfolds, there is an obvious omniscient narrator pushing the story along. Wayne C. Booth was an American literary critic who made many compelling arguments about the existence of an ever-present narrator in his most profound work, The Rhetoric of Fiction. Lost Highway appears to be shifting from one characters P.O.V. to the next. The film becomes a story of telling vs. showing. Booth argues, Everything he shows will serve to tell; the line between showing and telling is always to some degree an arbitrary one (20). Obviously it is a film, so everything is being shown visually, but there is much that is not told through action and the viewer must interpret for themselves the dependability of the characters. The reliability of the narrative voice is called into question when the cop in Scene 4 asks Fred, Cop: Do you own a video camera? Renee: No, Fred hates them. Fred: I like to remember things my own way. Cop: What do you mean by that? Fred: How I remember them, not necessarily the way they happened. (Lost Highway)

The P.O.V. switches once more and the viewer discovers that Fred is the omniscient narrator. We then understand that everything in the film is just a projection of Freds reality and how he remembers it. This scene occurs after the Madisons house was broken into and videotapes containing the couple in the privacy of their own home were placed anonymously on their doorstep. The videotapes appear to be symbolic foreshadowing, nudging the viewer to watch this world within a world and the apparent calamity about to ensue.

3 The theme of voyeurism is prevalent throughout many of Lynchs films. He wrote Lost Highway fascinated with voyeurism, using it to reveal fundamental truths about prevalent characters. This theme of the voyeur also serves as an influential motivator of the plot. Lynch is quoted as saying, I'm convinced we all are voyeurs. It's part of the detective thing. We want to know secrets and we want to know what goes on behind those windows. And not in a way that we would use to hurt anyone. There's an entertainment value to it, but at the same time we want to know: What do humans do? Do they do the same things as I do? It's a gaining of some sort of knowledge, I think. (thecityofabsurdity.com) The safety of Fred and Renee is jeopardized when they see these videos. Their privacy is violated. They react with a mixture of fear and denial. With the unveiling of Fred as the omniscient narrative voice, the rest of the films truths are deemed unreliable. Lynch chose the character of Fred to be the unreliable narrator for the purpose of abandoning traditional story lines. The viewer is called upon to extrapolate what is being shown and in that, how the story is being told. It no longer matters who the viewer chooses to sympathize with, the truth is no longer part of the whole and no longer relevant to the success of the narrative. When this is revealed, the narrative begins to become abstracted into multiple realities. Lynch defies traditional narrative structure repeatedly throughout Lost Highway. He is only able to do this because he rejects the ideas of the Greek philosopher Aristotle. Aristotles Poetics was written in about 335 B.C.E. (Wikipedia.org). Poetics is one of the first writings ever published to dissect dramatic and literary theory. In the Poetics, Aristotle expands on his ideas of what makes for a successful story. He argues that a beginning, middle, and end are needed to effectively complete any story. Lynch rebels against this idea by basing the structure of the film on

4 a musical fugue; A fugue starts off one way, takes up on another direction, and then comes back to the original, so it [relates] to the form of the film (thecityofsbsurdity.com). Lynch also calls into question Aristotles ideas of traditional protagonists and antagonists. Unable to identify with Freds actions, the viewers are forced to assign their own ethical meanings to the characters. Aristotle believed, If it is an enemy against an enemy, nothing he is doing or about to do will be pitiable except the suffering in and of itself, nor will it be pitiable when they have neither relation to one another (39). Each character in Lost Highway is arguably of a rogue type. In particular, one should dissect the whole relationship between Fred and Mr. Eddy/Dick Laurent. Both are violent, impulsive, and completely incapable of feeling anything deeper than a sexual attraction to the female leads. In fact, both characters are similar in that they share a compassionless existence, almost as if depleted of a soul. We are challenged as viewers to ask ourselves, is one character morally superior to the other? In our reality, no, but when in Freds reality, the lines of created ethics are enormously blurred. As the viewer is forced to interpret multiple versions of the story, the only relatability comes from the suffering of the characters themselves, not in their relationships to one another. Lynch opposes the importance of Aristotles states of character and that they [the characters] be solidly reliable (41). As reality in the movie is based on Freds psychosis, all characters and events are delusive. The film structurally follows the construction of a musical fugue, but it is based upon Freds psychogenic fugue as well. Lynch was interviewed about Lost Highway and said this about its unusual structure, Sometime during the shooting, the unit publicist was reading up on different types of mental illness, and she hit upon this thing called psychogenic fugue. The person suffering

5 from it creates in their mind a completely new identity, new friends, new home, new everything - they forget their past identity. (thecityofabsurdity.com) After brutally murdering his wife Renee, Fred lies in his jail cell trying to rationalize why he did what he did. In doing so, he triggers a psychogenic fugue, assuming the identity of a Peter Raymond Dayton. The characters then separate into multiple dimensional realities. In confusing the viewer, Lynch focuses on the, soul of the tragedy first, and the states of character rank second (Aristotle 28). Tragedy in Aristotles eyes is most similarly imitated by action. With almost every action Fred takes, tragedy follows, similarly with all the characters in the film. With these constant plot twists and character developments, Lynch relies heavily upon Aristotles theories of discovery and reversal, A discovery is a change from ignorance to recognition, leading toward either friendship or hostility in people bound for good or bad fortune. A discovery is most beautiful when it happens at the same time as a reversal. (35) In Lost Highway, a reversal often happens at the same time as a discovery. For example, just as soon as we make the discovery that Fred murdered Renee, the plot is reversed and he appears to us no longer as Fred but as Peter. We as viewers are observing the action being shown, we make a crucial discovery about the character in focus, and then this discovery is reversed, revealing different truths. This is a tool that proves useful to Lynch as he constantly changes the pace and direction of the film. The most unique part of watching Lost Highway is the almost antagonistic dialogue that is created between the film and the viewer. The relationship between reader/viewer and author/director was one analyzed by the Russian-American author, Vladimir Nabokov. In his essay, Good Readers and Writers, Nabokov believes there should be an artistic harmonious

6 balance between the readers mind and the authors mind (634). There is most definitely not a balance created but an intricate puzzle of subtleties to devour. Lynch is consciously separating himself from the identity of the viewer. In this excerpt from Nabokovs Good Readers and Writers, he talks more about this relationship between the reader/viewer and the author/director. We ought to remain a little aloof and take pleasure in this aloofness while at the same time we keenly enjoy passionately enjoy, enjoy with tears and shivers the inner weave of a given masterpiece. To be quite objective in these matters is of course impossible. Everything that is worthwhile is to some extent subjective. For instance, you sitting there may be merely my dream, and I may be your nightmare. But what I mean is that the reader (viewer) must know when and where to curb his imagination and this he does by trying to get clear the specific world the author (director) places at his disposal. (634) According to Nabokov, the viewer can experience a film by Lynch and remain objective. Yet, Lost Highway brings the viewer into an awareness of his or her own mortality. The characters lack of humanity and obvious emotional stiffness make it nearly impossible to ally with any one of them. It becomes apparent that the world of the viewer and the world of Lynch remain entirely separate and utterly disharmonious. To become conscious of our own morals and ethics and those of the characters and in addition, those of the director, is quite powerful for a film. Once we have achieved this consciousness, the viewer is then forced to try on many uncomfortable mental states when enduring the entirety of Lost Highway. Mental states are examined thoroughly by the scholar Lisa Zunshine in her novel, Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. She popularized the term Theory of Mind, which is ones capacity to understand what other people know, think, or feel. It is important to note that others have beliefs, desires, and intentions that differ from ones own mental states. Lost Highway is filled with many

7 incongruous actions that are unexplained, and as soon as one might start identifying familiar mental states in one character, Lynch pulls the rug from under us, and the viewer is left to reinterpret meanings once more. This frustration can be clarified with Zunshines argument, Our evolved cognitive tendency to assume that there must be a mental stance behind each physical action and our striving to represent to ourselves that possible mental stance even when the author had left us with the absolute minimum of necessary cues for constructing such a representation. (23) When Fred says, I remember things my own way (Lost Highway), Lynch is asking us as viewers to relinquish control. In Lost Highway, the characters speak little and cryptically, yet purposefully, and the background environments are intentionally minimal to exaggerate the characters themselves. We, the viewers, are left to use Theory of Mind to, intuit a complex state of mind based on a limited verbal description (Zunshine 6). As viewers, we are merely observers in a Lynchian non-linear hysterical tragedy. As these observers, we are actively attempting to as Zunshine explains, Make sense of what we read [or see and what] appears to be grounded in our ability to invest the flimsy verbal constructions that we generously call characters with a potential for a variety of thoughts, feelings, and desires and then to look for the cues that would allow us to guess at their feelings and thus predict their actions. (10) It would make sense that any kind of character have humanistic traits, but in Lost Highway, our cognitive mind reading abilities have many limitations. The pacing of the movie, the unexplained cuts to the next scene, also plays with our mindreading ability. We assume that the length of the scene and its pace would add or detract from its meaning. Lynch throws that familiarity out the window with the many dream sequences and

8 abrupt character transformations. The crude morphology of characters makes any level of comfort unattainable. As viewers, we readily come to understand that there will be no kind of relief awarded us within the film. The last scene of the film reveals both its climax and its conclusion. The viewer is left unsatisfied, with no real resolution. As viewers, Fred and his violent actions leave us repulsed. Repulsion is a theme examined by the German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer. In his thesis, On Aesthetics, Schopenhauer argues that the reason our genus finds something unattractive is, Every material thing is beautiful, and consequently every animal is beautiful. If this is not evident to us in the case of certain animals it is because we are not in a position to regard them purely objectively and thus comprehend the Idea of them, but are prevented from doing so by some inescapable though-association, usually the result of an obtrusive similarity. (160) Much in Lynchs films focuses on the unattractive or uncomfortable. This would be to say we find the characters ugly or their actions revolting because of our own learned ethics and morals. Or maybe, we see in these characters own inhumanity, a reflection of ourselves. Schopenhauer defines drama by separating it into three parts; what is interesting, what is sentimental, and what the tragic is aimed at (164). Lynch tends to concentrate solely on Schopenhauers idea that the highest and hardest stage the tragic is aimed at: grievous suffering, the misery of existence is brought before us, and the final outcome is here the vanity of all human striving (164). Lynch cares less about if the viewer is interested in the characters or any sentimentality they might or might not arouse. Lynch asks the viewer to enter his world without any pre-conceived notions. Thus, their emotional responses will be less polluted. If the viewer were to assume or expect certain things out

9 of the film, it would lessen its impact as a whole. This parallels Schopenhauers beliefs exactly when he writes about, the will-less subject of knowledge, i.e. a pure intelligence without aims or intentions. If the will is inherently evil, it will inhibit us from having pure perspicacity. Once the viewer has entered Lynchs world, the individual is transformed from a willing subject into a purely knowing subject, yet continues to be conscious of himself and of his actions as a knowing subject (Schopenhauer 155). This parallels Nabokovs idea of the self-awareness gained when a harmonious relationship between the viewer/reader and director/author is forged. If we approached Lost Highway with just our will and an aim to understand it, we would never become purely knowing subjects. It is when we renounce our will that the viewers individual relationship with the film is forged. Schopenhauer argues that, works of genius owes its origin to precisely the fact that primal artistic knowledge is entirely separated from and independent of will, is will-less (158). Thus, the viewer is left with the reality of the film in and of itself and separately, their own interpretation of it as knowing subjects. This experience-driven narrative is what creates multiple experiential realities. Lost Highway, as a film, follows no conventional narrative structure. Lynch defies Aristotles popularly accepted Poetics. He risks using an unreliable omniscient narrator and even eliminates the idea of a relatable protagonist. He challenges Nabokovs belief in a melodious relationship between viewer and director by forcing us to interrogate our own humaneness. Lynch challenges the viewer to ask themselves introspective questions about reality and about our place in it. Lynch is not afraid of confrontation. It is this fearlessness and this belief we are to remove our will and feel something wholly that distinguishes David Lynch as an artist. One can watch a film by Lynch and experience it in an infinite number of ways. How disturbing or humorous it turns out to be may be directly proportional to the stability of ones own state of mind.

10 Works Cited Aristotle, Poetics. Translated with Introduction and Notes, Joe Sachs. Newburyport, MA: Focus Publishing/ R. Pullins Company, 2006. Print. Booth, Wayne. C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1961, 1983. Print. Nabokov, Vladimir. Good Readers and Good Writers, found in The Norton Reader, An Anthology of Nonfiction. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2008. Print. Schopenhauer, Arthur. Essays and Aphorisms. London: Penguin Books Ltd, 1970. Print. Zunshine, Lisa. Why We Read Fiction, Theory of Mind and the Novel. The Ohio State Univeristy, 2006. Print. Mike Hartman, Compilation of Interviews with David Lynch, http://www.thecityofabsurdity.com/index.html. 1996-99. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poetics_(Aristotle), last modified December 5, 2011 Lost Highway. Dir. David Lynch. Perf. Bill Pullman, Patricia Arquette, John Roselius. Universal, 1997. Film.