The Privilege And Responsibility Of Reconsideration
With my new freedom came the need not only to move forward, but also the necessity for reconsideration.
Time depleted my feeling of satisfaction with my exploration of David Lynch’s cinema in The Passion of David Lynch. 1997, as my book about Lynch was hitting the stores, was the watershed year of my doubts.
The catalyst was the release in that year of Lost Highway. Although I had tried in my last chapter of The Passion of David Lynch to fit Lost Highway into its quasi-Jungian theoretical framework, I could not escape the feeling that I had achieved no illumination of protagonist Fred Madison’s (Bill Pullman) mutation into a complete stranger he had never met before, Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty). What did this shocking mutability of matter have to do with the unified spirit that binds us all which I had extrapolated on in my book? Nothing. But I was also completely unconvinced by the approach being taken by other critics, who were spilling much ink trying to shoehorn Lost Highway into a structure of dream versus reality. As I saw it, presuming a dream/reality landscape as the explanation of Madison’s metamorphosis into Dayton threatened to both trivialize Lynch and ignore the disorienting experience of watching Lost Highway. When you come down to it, that explanation of Fred’s metamorphosis is much too reassuring. It does nothing but lead us away from seeking the secret of the discombobulation wrought in us by the physical havoc in Lynch’s film.
By the time I saw Inland Empire (2006), even though I hadn’t yet arrived at an explanation, I did have a direction. I had reviewed my early conversations with Lynch and realized that although I had dutifully focused on what he had said to me about the universal link among all human beings, from which I had extrapolated Jung as a useful point of reference, I had ignored everything he said to me about physics. Quantum mechanics, in fact. Do we routinely screen out what is not familiar? Or was I particularly intellectually lazy? Unwilling to make the effort to push myself beyond my limits to engage physics? Regardless, just as I knew in 1986 that Blue Velvet, the first Lynch film I had ever seen, was calling me to open up a new door; in 2006, I knew that my questions about Lost Highway and the films that followed were calling me to investigate a possible Lynch/quantum mechanics link.
Where to begin? Friends directed me to a New Age DVD called What The Bleep?: Down the Rabbit Hole, which considered the implications for our lives of the sciences. Or the implications according to a small group of enthusiasts. One physicist I knew spoke of What the Bleep? scornfully, and told me that one of the physicists interviewed had been misled as to what the DVD was about and had tried to sue the pertinent parties for deception. He wouldn’t reveal the pertinent name.
The game was afoot! I followed a trail of clues to Columbia University and found Professor David Z. Albert, Frederick E. Woodbridge Professor of Philosophy and Director of the M. A. Program in the Philosophical Foundations of Physics. He took time out to teach me physics, and pick apart the problems posed by popularizers like those who had made What the Bleep? Since he loves the work of David Lynch, he was happy to talk with me about physics and Lynch.
On March 18, 2010, I told an astonished David Lynch about my study of physics, and an amazing three hour interview ensued, in which Lynch was so unguarded and forthcoming about my new ideas that he later insisted that I not print the transcript of our talk. Of course, he did not and would not ask me not to consider what was said as I wrote my new book, David Lynch Swerves: Uncertainty From Lost Highway to Inland Empire. And how could I not? As it has turned out, my first book, The Passion of David Lynch was a way station on my path, not my destination. As far as it went, it has been helpful to me and to my readers for engaging with Lynch as filmmaker. But when it would no longer serve…… The late and much missed Bob Sklar, told me it was dangerous to reconsider my earlier work in print in such a dramatic fashion. He feared it would raise alarm bells in the academic marketplace. And indeed I can imagine that some might think that if my first conclusion was not completely correct, I was likely to be unreliable in my reconsideration. But that kind of rigidity, as I see it, defeats the academic dedication to the life of the mind. My dear friend and editor Jim Burr, of the University of Texas Press backed me all the way. Although I truly am grateful for Bob’s concern, here I stand. I can do no other.