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I also think the questions are the wrong ones. At issue is not whether Deleuze would approve of Lynch's film, but rather what a deleuzian approach to a philosophy of practice could make of films like Mulholland Drive and Lost Highway. In my understanding, Deleuze's approach is to see a film as self-referential, as complete in and of itself, regardless of its contraries and discontinuities, and always grounded in itself, in its own practices. A film, then, relates first and foremost to itself. This quality of recursivity in a film is what enables me to argue that Deleuze's approach to film is cosmic, the creation of a cosmos in its own right, in which how the film relates to realities or ideas outside itself is a secondary concern, secondary to how (epistemologically) it works within itself. Why (ontologically) it can work the way it does then becomes an issue, and this opens to film-as-representation and so forth. This quality of self-referentiality, of cosmic recursiveness in Deleuze's thinking is what, in my view, enables him (and elsewhere, Guattari) to create a new language for the new worlds of a new technology. The suggestion that Lost Highway can be thought of through a moebius dynamic is very much to the point. The moebius dynamic is not only recursive, it continuously relates inside to its outside, outside to its inside, thereby both re-forming and reconstituting itself in ongoing ways, as a cosmos would. Mulholland Drive and Lost Highway are both profoundly self-referential recursive films, utterly grounded in their own practices, where their outsides are in the process of becoming their insides, their insides their own outsides. In a systemic sense, this is Lynch's forte: the cosmos that is MD or LH is grounded in and refers to itself. Both Freud and Lacan are profoundly systemic thinkers, and this may be why Dan can make good use of them in relation to Lynch's films. But to take this a step further, what if Freud and/or Lacan were used to comprehend one of these Lynch films in its entirety, what would appear then? Don >It seems to me that Lynch is so terrifying because his films are >dreamlike in the Freudian sense, i.e., they deal with what is deeply >repressed within us, satisfying our most forbidden desires in the >process. Indeed, much of Mulholland Drive, I would contend, is the >dream of the Watts character. The climax of the film is her >suicide, gratifying the death instinct in a stunning fashion. The >first lesbian scene is one of the hottest I can remember in a >mainstream film, and many of his scenes appeal to the scopophilic >pleasures of voyeurism. Lynch delights in violating taboos; he even >managed to make babies and parenthood look monstrous in Eraserhead. >Like dreams, Lynch's films are often hard to figure out, although >most of what he does (I would contend) is explicable in >Freudian/Lacanian terms by approaching the film as the manifest >content and searching for the latent meaning behind it...when I >offer my students a Freudian reading of Mulholland Drive, it all >begins to make sense to them. I think his work exhibits a great >affinity for surrealism, and shares the surrealist goal of making >the unconscious conscious. > >But again, except for being films of which Deleuze would approve, >what is philosophical about his work? For example, is Lynch a >nihilist/absurdist? What is his view of human nature? of the >limits of Human knowledge? of the prospects for romantic love, etc? >Or are these simply the wrong questions to ask? > >"For beauty is the beginning of terror we are still able to bear, >and why we love it so is because it so serenely disdains to destroy >us" Rilke's First Duino Elegy > >Daniel Shaw >website: www.lhup.edu/dshaw > > >________________________________ > > >* >* >Film-Philosophy Email Discussion Salon. >After hitting 'reply' please always delete the text of the message >you are replying to. >To leave, send the message: leave film-philosophy to: [log in to unmask] >For help email: [log in to unmask], not the salon. >** * * Film-Philosophy Email Discussion Salon. After hitting 'reply' please always delete the text of the message you are replying to. To leave, send the message: leave film-philosophy to: [log in to unmask] For help email: [log in to unmask], not the salon. **