The inner journey toward a radical otherness: Music in the movies by David Lynch and A Novel about London of Milos Crnjanski

Abstract

The musical dimension of David Lynch's films represents an area of musical characters as semiotic and narrative characters, which constitute the meaning of images and imprint transgressions, obscurities, transcendence into it. The auditory system of Lynch's cinema turns the protagonists (as well as interpreters of the film) towards themselves, makes them lend an ear to themselves, just as it gradually shifts them out of self-control, out of the power to hear themselves, moves them towards that which they can hear, towards that which liberates them of the self, but which actually pressures them unbearably, towards that which is the radical Otherness in the subject, in the sound, in the world, towards that which is their constituent exteriority. Melodic storytelling out of the experience of closure in David Lynch's film Mulholland Drive is reminiscent of the poetics found in the novels of Miloš Crnjanski. Internal movement towards the radical Otherness, broken down in the story which follows, but autopoetically already formed as something finished, as a subliminal futurity-anteriority (which the story itself cannot see), as an exit and unconditional reversibility, as an odd feeling of foreignness to slip into, but which is already within the subject, as a negative ontotheology, enables reflections between A Novel about London by Crnjanski and the musical-narrativesymbolic structures of Lynch's cinema. As we make steps in the trail of protagonists of Crnjanski's novels and Lynch's films, it is music that establishes and reveals those steps as walking towards/with those who are already gone.