“David Lynch has described his film Eraser head in this manner…” “A dream of dark and troubling things.” “And… uh…” “Would you like to expound on that a little?” “No.” David Lynch is famous for his reluctance to verbally explain or clarify the intentions behind his work. It’s a tendency exhibited as early as this student led interview in 1979, and it’s repeatedly reflected in what Lynch does say, that: “As soon as you put things in words, no one ever sees the film the same way.” “And that’s what I hate, you know.” “Talking—it’s real dangerous.” And this troubled relationship with words extends to the work itself.
From the backwards riddles of The Man from Another Place to the hearing loss of Lynch’s own Twin Peaks character, Gordon Cole. “You’ll have to speak up Sheriff. Hearings gone, long story.”
In his book ‘The Man from Another Place’, film writer Dennis Lim writes of Gordon’s character that, “so much about Lynch’s fraught relationship with language is summed up in that voice, in its unnervingly high volume and halting cadences.” This ‘fraught relationship’ with language repeatedly appears as a need to twist, invert and disrupt it, and seems indicative of an underlying fear or, perhaps more accurately, a mistrust of the spoken or written word, and its power.
The art image or object and written language have historically been thought of as hostile concepts, with artist Robert Morris once writing in his dream journal that “the wall label disturbed my sleep. It grew to threatening proportions, entwined itself around me, babbled in my ear, wrapped itself over my eyes. It was a tangled, suffocating shroud of seething words in my dream”.
And this nightmarish description of the wall text, the written explanation that would accompany his work, finds a visual companion in one of Lynch’s earliest short films ‘The Alphabet’, where a child is tormented by the incessant chanting of the alphabet that invades their dreams.
But, more than a suffocating shroud, the letters here emerge violently, secreted onto the screen through ruptured openings. The letters creep and spread like an infection before entering the head of a human figure, causing it to bleed and disintegrate. But, rather than the letters themselves necessarily invoking this anguish, it’s their ceremonial delivery that transforms them into something menacing. The threatening chant like an anthem of conformity, a structural order mirrored in the scales and arpeggios of the vocals that follow, as well as in the very arrangement of the alphabet, repeatedly presented in its familiar linear form.
It’s these formal structures that shape the anxiety behind the film, suggesting that there’s something dangerous and violent in the act of learning, in the formation of language, in binding expression with words.
According to Lynch, language “changes things, as soon as you know what something is.” “If you don’t know what it is, a sore can be very beautiful…” “… but as soon as you name it, it stops being beautiful to most people…” “… but if you took a picture of it, a close up, and you didn’t know exactly what it was…” “… it could be a great beauty of organic phenomenon.” So, this uneasiness surrounding words is really to do with the limitations they suddenly enforce when used as a tool of translation, to translate an image, a feeling or thought into a language that doesn’t quite allow for the same nuance or abstraction – to take something suggestive and reduce it to something definitive.
But this apprehension towards words doesn’t necessarily require a rejection of them, or even a reluctance to use them.
Lynch may remain ambiguous when discussing interpretation but has frequently spoken about his creative process and formative experiences, and, in addition to the parade of letters in ‘The Alphabet’, the written and spoken word remain central to the work. The words of Lynch’s film and television work emerge as memorably enigmatic phrases that only pose more questions than they could ever answer. Commenting on the speech patterns of Lynch’s dialogue, Dennis Lim determined that: “the impression is of language used less for meaning than for sound.
To savour the thingness of words is to move away from their imprisoning nature”. This impression of words as somewhat divorced from linguistic intent is a technique that resurfaces throughout Lynch’s image-making.
These works inscribe a naively worded description onto the surface of the image, titles that are reminiscent of the art history tradition where works are simply named after their subject matter such as ‘Still Life with a Swan’ or ‘Self Portrait with Sunflower’. But these descriptions, while accurate to the image, complicate the work as much as they explain it – with absurd or violent imagery communicated with direct simplicity.
And so, instead of merely acting as translation, the title transcends the limitations of the label in becoming complicit in the ambiguity, stripping the words of their definitive power. Lynch’s work repeatedly draws attention to this relationship between words and the objects they describe, always with the intent of disrupting it and taking control of it. In his Ricky Board series, the transformative power of naming is both exposed and manipulated, exploring how identical objects, such as flies or bees, can change when given different names.
Lynch has detailed the instructions to this process, ending with a poem that explains: Even though they’re all the same The change comes from the name As well as demonstrating how words can alter or contaminate our understanding of an object, in a way, this also challenges the presupposed unity of a thing and its name. Instead of reading the name as a direct and uncompromised translation of the thing it describes, these works indicate a more uncertain relationship. In his catalogue essay for the exhibition David Lynch: Naming, curator Brett Littman comments that: “… the act of naming something is never a simple gesture.” “For Lynch, the drawing of an ‘ant’ and the written word ‘ant’ are never co-equal or necessarily co-descriptive.” One can’t be considered a direct translation of the other.
Similarly, this uncertainty between word and object is paralleled in the interruption often found between voice and body in Lynch’s moving image work. In the silent advice of the log in Twin Peaks, the distorted voice over the intercom in Lost Highway, or the repeated use of lip-synching and miming in Blue Velvet and Mullholland Drive, once again suggesting an uncertain relationship between word and body in creating, not only a separation of space but equally of time in the supposed live performance of a pre-recorded voice. It’s this final mime in Mulholland Drive, a Spanish acapella cover of Roy Orbison’s ‘Crying’ that deals most intensely with the modes of translation implicit in this separation: pre-recorded performance to live, original song to cover and the original English language to Spanish. And this idea of translation is one that I keep returning to when talking about the written and spoken word in Lynch’s work – the danger of translating an image to writing, the desire to undermine the written word’s definitive power and to emphasise acts of translation that aren’t always so readily apparent.
As Pedro Carolino once mistranslated: It is difficult to enjoy well so much several languages.
This is the final remark in a hypothetical exchange in his phrasebook ‘English as She is Spoke’, well known for, as both that line and the title might suggest, the unintentional humour of its mistranslation of Portuguese phrases to English, but it’s the mistranslation that inadvertently proves the truth in this line. Conveying the meaning of one language in another is difficult, perhaps, according to Lynch’s work, even impossible. Obviously we’re not talking here about the literal translation of one spoken language to another, but of the reconfiguration of meaning as it travels from one state to another, from thought to description, feeling to image, image to word, and also from one person to another.
The artist Allison Katz writes in her essay ‘What is at Hand?’, “I know a dance critic who learnt how to write her reviews by taking courses in literary translation.
To move between French and English for example is, in her mind, the same as moving from seeing a dance performance to writing about it”. I think this comparison deftly reveals the hidden translations with which we all regularly engage but that so often go unnoticed, and Lynch’s approach to the written and spoken word seems to mourn what is lost in this process. His early ‘kit’ series, particularly ‘Fish Kit’ from 1979 takes this idea of re-assembling something as a process incapable of producing that thing in its original pre-disassembled state. Three assembled parts of a dead fish will not reproduce the live fish it once was. And, in a way, this is a pretty apt metaphor for interpretation or, perhaps even, all communication.
We might receive signals, but there’s a distance there, between one person and another between meaning and interpretation between what is said and what we understand. I chose to include this example from Carolino’s phrase book, not just for its irony, but also because of how this interaction is titled: ‘to inform oneself of a person’. It’s an unintentionally appropriate introduction to the nature of language and why Lynch might be so wary of it, fundamentally linking language and translation to the act of knowing another person, a relationship that necessitates the invisible disassembling and reassembling of meaning and intent, even if we think we’re speaking the same language. But even though with each translation something is undoubtedly lost, with each translator, each viewer, something is also gained. Just as the Ricky Board flies change with their name, it’s this negotiation that prevents an idea from ever being reduced to something definitive.
Rather than rejecting written or spoken language, running from it, Lynch uses words to make us aware of their shortcomings, refuting their authority, making them uncertain, but still, never underestimating the power of silence. [Blue Haired Woman] “Silencio.” Hey everyone, this was actually supposed to be my one year anniversary video but it’s, um, 2 months late. but I’m still counting this as an anniversary video because my first video was on David Lynch so it seems fitting.
I don’t know if I’ll make any more videos on David Lynch as I think the world is probably at capacity on David Lynch videos. But thank you for choosing to watch this one, and I hope I’ll see you next time.
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