David Lynch Swerves: Uncertainty from Lost Highway to Inland Empire by Martha P. Nochimson

Abstract

Reviewed by: David Lynch Swerves: Uncertainty from Lost Highway to Inland Empire by Martha P. Nochimson Justus Nieland (bio) David Lynch Swerves: Uncertainty from Lost Highway to Inland Empire by Martha P. Nochimson. University of Texas Press. 2013. $36.85 hardcover; $16.75 paper. 295 pages. Does David Lynch really just want us to be happy? Should his cinema be considered a suite of filmic fables that seek to set spectators on the path to bliss and enlightenment? Martha P. Nochimson thinks so and seeks to fuse the domains of quantum physics and mysticism in David Lynch Swerves, a companion volume to her 1997 study of the director, The Passion of David Lynch: Wild at Heart in Hollywood.1 Nochimson’s latest work offers close readings of the four feature films Lynch has completed over the past two decades—Lost Highway (1997), The Straight Story (1999), Mulholland Drive (2001), and Inland Empire (2006)—which she considers a qualitatively discrete group in Lynch’s oeuvre. For her, the quartet constitutes Lynch’s “second-stage cinema” largely because the films are “increasingly audacious in their depiction of uncertainty,” an encounter with the strangeness of matter itself that Nochimson attributes to Lynch’s “impressionistic gleaning of physics.”2 For readers who may be unfamiliar with The Passion of David Lynch, I should note that Nochimson’s method in that earlier work was to read Lynch’s films, from Eraserhead (1977) to Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992), as allegories of their protagonists’ visionary capacities—their receptivity to energies and states of consciousness that exist “beyond the entrenched ordinary limitations of cultural and linguistic and social structures.”3 Nochimson’s pursuit of the Lynchian beyond was Jungian, partially, and in a fashion that other critics of Lynch’s work—most notably Slavoj Žižek—cast as basically New Age in orientation.4 [End Page 165] Lynch’s “second-stage” films, Nochimson now posits, are marked by protagonists with a “dubious trajectory; Lynch builds suspense about whether or not they will interpret their experience of energies from beyond in a negative or positive fashion.”5 From Lost Highway’s Fred Madison (Bill Pullman) to Inland Empire’s Nikki Grace (Laura Dern), these second-stage seekers are increasingly beset by the vexations of matter in a quantum universe. Such is the book’s subtitular “uncertainty,” which pervades the reality of the so-called marketplace of quotidian striving that the Lynchian quester must negotiate and transcend. When Lynch’s characters conquer the fear that accompanies the “shattering of our illusions about matter,” they affirm Lynch’s belief that “an enduring security is possible for humanity,” and are bathed—often literally so—in the “light of [an] optimistic belief” in a “universe of immense power and beauty beyond the limits of human cultures.”6 What is admirable in this approach is its initial proposal to rethink Lynch as a materialist. A “full and rich reading of Lynch,” Nochimson insists, must “not only take into account the many levels of human interiority, but also Lynch’s images that reference the many possibilities offered by the multiple levels of the external world of matter.”7 Here, and in her readings of the individual films, Nochimson attempts to mobilize concepts and terms from the field of quantum mechanics (“superposition,” “entanglement,” “nonlocality,” “decoherence”). This discipline’s attentiveness to the essential instability of things and the foundational strangeness of the universe would seem to comport with the multiple affronts to causality, logic, and the Newtonian behavior of bodies and objects apparent to even the most casual Lynchian fan, who knows well that shit is far out in the “Lynchverse.” One might call it “a strange world”—“wild at heart and weird on top,” you could even say. But Nochimson, ultimately, is less interested in quantum mechanics itself—or the materialism underlying it—than she is in brokering a compromise between modern physics and a Lynchian cosmology, which requires drawing analogies between the “essential limitlessness” of the building blocks of matter on a particle level and Lynch’s faith in a “paradigm of cosmic ‘beyondness’” that “comes from the Vedic tradition.”8 This qualification is crucial, as it fuels Nochimson’s way of...