Postmodern Cartographies

[Dave Monroe]

Continuing in Brian Jarvis, Postmodern Cartographies:
The Geographical Imagination in Contemporary American
Culture (New York: St. Martin's, 1998), Ch. 13,
"Cherry-Pie Heaven: David Lynch," pp. 168-83 ...

"Robin Wood's suggestion that the popor initial
response to Blade Runner was attributable to its
subversive political content needs to be reassessed in
light of Dune's failure.  Lynch's film flaunted a
potent admixture of miltarism and fundamentalist
messianism, alongside a recationary sexual politics
and an expliciut insistence on the necessity for
strong leaders and nuclear families within a stable
society.... Dune ought to have been a cinematic
flagship for Reagan's America." (p. 168)

   "Classical surrealism's irrationalism was a
potentially subversive antidote to dominant ideology. 
Lynch's irrationalism, however, acts as a core for the
consonance of his work with dominant ideology.... it
simply enables the extraction of place from its
material historical context and its coversion into an
array of empty signs that offer mindless pleasures [!]
...." (p. 182)

   "In A Cinema without Walls [q.v.] Timothy Corrigan
responds to this kenosis thus: 'In David Lynch's Blue
Velvet there are no politics because there are only
illegible social configurations' (Corrigan 1991, p.
71).  Lynch's surreal, intertextual mappings of a
hyperreal America appear to offer a purely visceral
pleasure, unecumbered by moral or political judgement.
 But the hegemony of the illegible image is of course
itself a profoundly political development." (p. 182)

"The Lynch text denies its rootedness in history, but
to understand it fully it must be returned to its
specific material circumstances and its relation to
hegemonic discourses in contemporary America
surrounding religion, sexuality, the family,
nostalgia, race and class.
   "One of the cornerstones of the New Right's rise to
political ascendancy was a dramatic resurgence in
religious fundamentalism.  Beneath the flamboyant
intertextuality and surrealism, conventional Christian
tropes figure centrally with the Lynch mise-en-scene:
images of angels, fire, darkness and light which are
suggestive of the persistence of an essentially
manichean sensibility beneath the persona of the
postmodern player.  Throughout Twin Peaks and Fire
Walk With Me domestic violence and sexual abuse are
associated with possession by evil spirits, thus
deflecting responsibility from the Moral Majority's
privilged and fetishised nuclear family unit.  The
collison between the forces of pure Good (embodied in
uniformes Law officers)and pure Evil (embodied in
denim, youthful rebellion, foreigners and criminal
masterminds) also echoes the New Right's mappings of
the moral landscape...." (pp. 181-2)

   "The reinvention of Original Sin in Lynch's work
parrots the rhetoric of the fundamentalist lobby. 
Eveil is understood as an elemental malignity.  There
is no attempt to explain it, it simply is.  Jeffrey's
critical question, 'Why are there men like Frank in
the world?' cannot be answered.  Similarly, with all
of Lynch's villains, from Baron Harkonnen to Bob,
there is no why, these things simply are.  Presenting
evil as a pre-social force reinforces the revisionism
of the New Right, with its effort to overturn
progressive orthodoxies institutionalised in the
1960s, concerning the socioeconomic and psychological
roots of deviance.  In Lynch's starnge world, like
that reviled by the moral majority, perverts, drug
trafficers and criminals do not need to be understood,
they simply require punsihment.  Evil is thus
mystified, shrouded in metaphysical enigma and
positioned outside the auspices of rational
explication.
   "There is a range of other symptoms of a
fundamentalk consonance betwen the Lynch oeuvre and
the New Right.  The politics of return are reproduce
din Lynch's insatiable nostalgia for the 1950s; that
is, the mythology of the Eisenhower era suitably
screened of Cold War hysteria, imperialist aggrssion,
social and racial repression.  Lynch's landscapes are
patrolled by Sheriffs called Harry S. Truman .... 
Turning the clock back in this way in film and
political rhetoric ahs the consequence of erasing the
disastrous consequences for traditional poewr groups
of Civil Rights activism, feminism and gay rights,
Viet Nam and Watergate.  The aim here is to will a
collective return to a time when America's virtue and
strength seemed assured, when its authority figures
could be trusted ... when women knew their place ...
when racial and ethnic minorities were practically
invisible to most white Americans ....  The New
Right's insistence that many of the problems
confronted by the working class were of their own
making ... reverberates in Lynch's works with a
demonisation of the disempowered.  Lynch's
anti-feminism, anti-environmentalism (reduced to a
comical 'Save the Pine Weasel' campaign in Twin
Peaks), his evasion of urban crisis, racial crisis,
class hostility and the conditions of labour,
alongside his essentailly religios representation of
ctim as sin, are all indices of the consonance,
beneath the glossy postmodern stylistics, between hsi
work and the dominant ideology in the Reagan-Bush era.
   "At heart, Lynch's cartography of America is far
from wild.  In fact it is profoundly right-wing and
driven by a voracious lust for order, control abd
stability.  It is structured around sublimely tidy
geographical oppositions ....  Narrative interest is
provided by the crossings between these sapces of a
Good male protagonist ....  These spaces are refracted
through media cliche and a parodic psychoanalysis, but
the insistence is always upon their polarisation and
the fact that these places can be experienced but
never known.
   "Essentaially, Lynch's cinema is informed by the
sensibility of the tourist....  Similar pleasures are
offered to the Lynch spectator--pleasures reminsicent
of the heady admixture of aestheticism and decadence
that erupted in European art in the 1890s.  Lynch is
best described as a fin de siecle film-maker who, like
the millenial prophet Baudrillard, produces images of
space imbued with a gleefully apocalyptic nihilism,
images that testify ultimately to the triumph of style
over substance." (pp. 183-4)

And see as well here ...

Alexander, John.  The Films of David Lynch.
   London: Letts, 1993.

Corrigan, Timothy.  A Cinema without Walls:
   Movies and Culture after Vietnam.  New York:
   Routledge, 1991.

And, what the heck, a bonus David Foster Wallace essay
...

http://www.geocities.com/~mikehartmann/papers/wallace.html

Lynch, by the way, does vote Republican ...


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